


Be Okay

by dddippinsauce



Series: Protectionverse [3]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gen, Ghost Hunters, Monsters, RV Life, Road Trips, Spooky, Witch Mabel Pines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-15 05:24:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 45,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8044117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dddippinsauce/pseuds/dddippinsauce
Summary: What happens when two people with a ton of supernatural-related baggage go looking for the supernatural. Two parts shenanigans, five parts emotional issues, three parts spookiness & horror, two parts hurt/comfort, four parts heartwarming love, intimacy, support. (Contains a variety of pinecest.)





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Be Okay is the sequel to Protection and D&MGTBATPH (which are grouped under the Protectionverse series here on AO3). The entire fic is based on [these prompts](http://stonelions.tumblr.com/post/124337611940/30-multipurpose-prompts-open-to-interpretation) (which you can read if you want, or not read if you want to be surprised). Some more literally, some much more loosely. It's been a labor of love, and I hope you enjoy.

_**The eleventh.** _

At ten in the morning on the eleventh day of August, Dipper turns in both sets of keys to his apartment, and Mabel steps with him out of the building and into the sunlight. His hand finds hers, his fingers winding between her own. She squeezes back. “Ready?” he asks.

She grins. “Born ready, baby.”

There’s still a bittersweet feeling to leaving behind the little top-floor apartment, but Mabel takes a deep breath and turns around, looking up at the building and the trees around it. “Goodbye, apartment,” she says. Dipper laughs a little, and he drops her hand as they go and climb into the cab of their Winnebago Warrior RV.

Mabel opens her canvas CD case — which is covered in an astonishing number of iron-on patches — and plucks out the first mix CD she’s lined up for their driving hours. “Ready when you are, broseph.” He grins at her and turns the key in the ignition.

The Warrior rumbles to life, and Mabel whoops and shoves the CD into the console. (The Warrior may be older than they are, but it’s been well-cared for, including an updated console and dash that allow for CDs. Not as modern as it could be, but good enough.) “Life is a Highway” immediately blares out.

Dipper turns an unimpressed look on Mabel. “Really?”

“Shoosh, there’s plenty of great stuff on this mix. I just had to put this one first. I dare you not to start singing along the second we get to the chorus.”

“Whatever.” But he’s smiling when he rolls his eyes, and, tucked safely in the low little cab of the Warrior, they pull out of the gravel driveway and start heading toward their first destinastion.

Mabel flips her sunglasses down in place and takes a long sip of her coffee. It’s not unbearably hot today, so they leave the windows rolled down, which fluffs her bangs all around her face once they’re on the highway. She just smiles. She can’t stop smiling. She’s wearing her flower-printed Docs and the aqua-blue “RV THERE YET?” tank top she made just for their first day (which had made Dipper groan and roll his eyes), and she leaves bright lip gloss stains on her coffee mug’s lid, and by now synthpop is thrumming from the speakers and Dipper, for all he complains about her electronica choices, is bopping his head and tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.

She lets her smiled widen and leans back in her seat. They’re only a little more than six hours of road-time away from their first stop, and Mabel’s looking forward to every single hour.

 

—

 

_**Lost at the creek.** _

Six hours is a long time to sit behind the wheel. A couple hours in, they stop for lunch, pulling tuna sandwiches they made earlier out of the tiny fridge in the area that counts for the Warrior’s kitchen, and Dipper suggests they walk out and enjoy the weather.

Mabel raises her eyebrows at him. “You wouldn’t rather curl up on the couch and read one of your nerd books?”

“Oh I’ve got nerd books on tape, sister. No time to sit and read when I’m always driving, right?”

She shakes her head. “Yeah, because you’re neurotic and don’t like letting anyone drive except you. You’re gonna get tired of that real fast here, brotato.”

He waves her comment away, nevermind the truth in it. “Yeah, yeah. C'mon, let’s go get some fresh air. What’s the point in driving all over the country if we don’t go out and explore it?”

They’re parked at, well, a park not far off the highway. Dipper makes sure they follow the trail as they go into the woods. Mabel chatters and adjusts the yellow handkerchief tied around her head as a headband, and eventually they hear running water.

Dipper notes where the path is, and then they head down the hill into the undergrowth. The sound of water runs louder until they come out to a small creek running over a rocky bed. Dipper’s stomach is growling, but they walk a little further still until they find a spot where the creek widens out into a slower-moving pool. There are large rocks all along the bank, and the sunlight filters down through the trees, and tiny insects dart above the water. Dipper and Mabel sit on the rocks, eat their sandwiches, drink from their water bottles, and breathe in the smell of the creek and the trees.

It’s weird, but Dipper feels almost like a golden veil settles around them, around the pool. It’s just the way the sunlight is coming in and glittering off the water, and it’s just how calm and at ease he is, but still. It feels safe and good and nice. So when they finish their lunch, he reaches into his backpack.

“So, um, Mabes.”

“Yes?”

He clears his throat. “I, uh, I made you something.”

Her eyes light up. “Really? What is it?”

He pulls it out and holds it out to her. Mabel’s lips part as she takes it from him. “It’s not much,” he says. It’s a little vial, no longer than Mabel’s pinky finger, at the end of a long loop of thin black cord. The vial is filled with dark purple glittering sand. She holds it up to the sunlight, turning it, her eyes wide. “I mean, I know you’re the, uh, the witch and all. But it’s supposed to help you. To like, protect you and stuff. Plus purple– I dunno, purple always reminds me of you.”

Mabel closes her fingers around the vial and looks at Dipper with gigantic, slightly damp eyes, and his mind races with worries that he’s done something wrong. But then she smiles this huge, bright smile, and she puts the necklace over her head and settles it down over her collarbones, the vial resting at the bottom of her chest. And she leans over and plants a kiss on his cheek. Dipper’s finds himself smiling, too, when she pulls back to meet his gaze and says, “It’s absolutely perfect, Dip.”

“Good. I was worried it would be… I dunno.”

“Don’t ‘dunno.’ It’s one-thousand-percent perfect.” She bites her lip for a second with her eyebrows cocked in a certain way, all of which is her number-one tell for wanting to say something but not saying it. But then the expression clears, and she’s standing up, holding out her hands for Dipper to take, and hauling him up to his feet as well. “Come on. Let’s get back on the road, my main man.”

They start walking back up towards the path together, Mabel’s arm linked through his, and Dipper can’t stop smiling.

Until he realizes they’ve been walking for close to ten minutes and the path is still nowhere in sight.

“Uh, Mabes.” Dipper stops, dropping her arm. “We didn’t cross the creek at any point, did we?”

“Hm? No. We just came straight from the path. Wait, shouldn’t we have already gotten back to it by now?”

“Yeah.” Dipper frowns, turning around in a circle. “Shit. Where did the path go?”

Mabel pulls her cell phone out of her pocket, then grumbles. “No reception. Of course not.”

“Okay. No need to freak out. It’s not a huge park, so we’re bound to not be too far from some path or another.” Dipper motions for Mabel to follow him. “Let’s go back down to the creek and follow it for a little while. We’ll come close to a path at some point.”

“If you say so.” Mabel doesn’t sound worried, just a little inconvenienced. That’s fine. They can deal with a little inconvenience.

But they keep walking along the creek, occasionally walking back up to try to find a path, and they never find one. An hour passes and Dipper can feel a twisting, itching nervousness crawling around in his chest. Mabel’s stopped humming 80’s pop ballads and is staring at the trees around them with something like distrust in her eyes.

And then they come back to the pool.

Both of them freeze in their tracks. Dipper glances at Mabel; her face is pale.

It’s the same pool. Dipper knows it is. That same feeling of a golden veil is there, the rocks are in the same places, the water is moving exactly the same. He can feel it’s the same. Still, he says, “We’ve been following the creek away from here.”

“It could be another pool,” Mabel says, but he can tell she doesn’t believe it.

The first tendrils of panic are skittering hot-and-cold down into Dipper’s stomach, up his neck into his head. He takes a deep breath and tries to shake it out. Maybe they just need to go in a different direction, strike out away from the creek, maybe, or—

“Turn your clothes inside-out,” Mabel says.

He turns and looks at her. She’s already shucking off her cardigan and reaching for the hem of her tank top. “Whoa, Mabel, hang on—”

“Turn them inside-out!” She yanks off her tank top and looks at him, intensely. “Just do it, Dipper.”

He hesitates, but she keeps stripping and pulling her clothes inside-out, so he takes off his backpack and tugs off his T-shirt, turning it inside-out. Then his jeans. “Socks too,” Mabel says from behind him. “Underwear wouldn’t hurt.”

“What, are you flipping your bra inside out?” he grumbles.

“As a matter of fact, I am. Don’t you peep.”

“Like I haven’t seen it before.” He puts his jeans back on. They feel weird inside-out, and he stops to try to figure out how the hell to zip them up this way without seriously injuring himself. “Why exactly are we doing this?”

“Faeries.”

Dipper whips around to face her. She’s got her socks and boots and shorts back on but is still working on her tank top. The purple-filled vial rests against her pink bra between her breasts. “Excuse me?”

“Faeries, Dipper. When you’re lost, you’re supposed to turn your clothes inside-out so the faeries can’t keep leading you off track.”

He huffs and buttons his jeans. Forget the zipper, he’ll leave his fly open, whatever. “You think faeries got us lost.”

She rolls her eyes. “I don’t know what got us lost. But this is as good a precaution as any, yeah? Isn’t it best to take whatever precautions we can think of?” She’s making good sense, all things considered, so Dipper doesn’t protest any more. “Besides, if we _are_ being pixie-led, I’d rather stop it now before we walk ourselves to death.”

Dipper pulls his shirt back on and re-shoulders his backpack. “So we try again, now?”

“Yep.” Mabel flashes him a grin, her irritation apparently cooling off. “See? Mabes knows some stuff, too.”

“Never said you didn’t.” Dipper lets out a sigh, releasing some tension with it. “Okay. Let’s try going back up the hill again.”

They pick their way through the undergrowth, hearing the birdsong overhead, for a few minutes. When the hill evens out to level ground again, Dipper still doesn’t see a path. But he does see a meadow ahead. And in it—

“Is that the Warrior?”

“Holy guacamole!” Mabel takes off in a sprint, her laughter ringing through the trees. Dipper swears under his breath and jogs after her. He meets her out in the sunny meadow where their RV is, in fact, parked in the grass. Just behind it is a road leading into the trees; when Dipper looks down it, he can see where it meets a parking lot.

“We definitely did not park this thing here,” he says.

Mabel waggles her eyebrows. “First weird-o entry in our travel log.”

Dipper rolls his eyes, looking out into the trees. “Really? We couldn’t even get through the first day without something messing with us?” But now that they’re safely back at the Warrior, a hint of a smile is tugging at his mouth. “All right, all right. Let’s get this thing back on the road before something else crazy happens.”

“Aye aye.” Mabel bounces up into the cab, and Dipper goes around to the driver’s side. There’s a half-second where he’s afraid the engine won’t start, but it does, without a problem, and they go down the weird little road to the parking lot and get back to the highway without a problem.

They drive two more hours until they hit a rest stop and Dipper finally turns his clothes right-side-out again.

 

—

 

_**Above, there is an attic.** _

The overall trip takes close to eight hours, considering their detour by the creek and a couple rest stops (the Warrior has its own toilet, but they have a mutual agreement to use it as little as possible to cut down on how often they have to empty out that particular tank). So it’s evening by the time they turn down that familiar bend in the road. They’re hitting the golden hour exactly, and Mabel’s heart swells with too many feelings to define when that water tower comes into view above the evergreens.

She rolls the window all the way down and leans her arms on the window ledge, then leans her head on her arms. Everything slides past: the diner, the drugstore, the town square. New shops and new landscaping have come in over the past ten years, but it still looks the same.

Mabel glances back over her shoulder at Dipper. He has a soft smile on his face. She smiles, too, and leans her head back down.

They drive under the trees, up the road that used to be dirt but got paved six years ago. Mabel leans further out the window, feeling the cooler air of the Oregon evening sweep over her shoulders. They follow the signs — not that they need to — and she looks for gnomes in the trees.

And finally Dipper brings the Warrior to a stop, and Mabel’s soft, sink-into-your-familiar-cozy-bed feeling of coming home gives way to excitement at last. She shoots Dipper a grin that he mirrors back, and they bang open the car doors and make for the Shack.

They careen right into the gift shop, where Soos and Melody are tidying up after the day’s work. “Dudes!” Soos meets them in the middle of the room, and the three of them turn into a giant bear-hug of tangled arms.

“How was the drive?” Melody asks, coming around from behind the counter.

Mabel disentangles herself so she can reach out an arm and hug Melody. “Good! Nice short little trip to get the Warrior warmed up for road-trippin’ this whole US of A.”

“The Mr. Pineses said you’re gonna travel looking for spooks to bust.” Soos grins at Dipper. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I dunno. We didn’t really tell anyone. I think I was worried it wasn’t going to work out.”

“Of course you were.” Mabel laughs. “Me, I just wanted to surprise everyone. Surprise!”

The gift shop is warm and smells like wood and dust, but the clean kind of dust-smell. It’s just like the rest of Gravity Falls – it’s changed in ten years, things rearranged or replaced, but the heart of it still feels the same. Mabel listens to the others as they continue talking, and she wraps her arms around herself, and she looks over at the old vending machine with another stir of too many feelings, but the final echo of them is one that settles warm in her heart.

“You dudes should stay here tonight,” Soos says. “We can put you up in the attic, old-times style.”

“You sure?” Dipper asks.

“Totally sure. Plus I’m making breakfast for dinner. Bacon and eggs and pancakes, dog. They’re not as good as Stancakes, but they’re pretty good.”

“Probably with much less hair in them. I’m in.” Dipper tips his head, looking at Mabel. “Mabes?”

She gives a thumbs-up. “Breakfast for dinner is my jam.”

Dinner is good, is great, is warm and happy and content. After they finish eating, Dipper and Melody clean up while Soos shows Mabel some of the new attractions in the Mystery Shack. She calls their grunkles to let them know she and Dipper made it into town and that they’ll come out to the cabin tomorrow. There’s a round of a board game when the dishes are done, then they catch the second half of some crappy-enough-to-laugh-at movie on TV, and then Melody gets them set up in the attic. The beds are gone, now — not that they’d fit in them anymore — but she brings them sleeping bags and pillows and piles and piles of blankets, and they make up nice comfortable nests on the floor. Then Soos and Melody say goodnight, and the twins are left alone in their attic.

They sit on their sleeping bags, facing the window. The lights are turned off, but moonlight streams in. The beds aren’t here anymore, but the room is the same. It’s the same rafters overhead, the same smell of pine and, faintly, must. It’s the same quiet house-settling creaks. It’s the same window, triangle-shaped. Soos never changed it. Maybe he never thought to, or maybe he didn’t think it was necessary. Mabel stares straight at it and doesn’t feel afraid.

Dipper’s staring at it, too, or out it, but it’s really the same at this point. Mabel can feel what he’s thinking; it’s clear in the weight of the air between them.

“We won’t let him win,” she says.

Dipper reaches over and takes her hand.

“He left a bunch of damage in his wake. All of it did. But it’s not going to stop us. We’ll use what we’ve learned for good, not let ourselves get eaten up by it.” She turns her head to look at Dipper. “Right?”

He meets her gaze. “Right.” He squeezes her hand gently, and she returns the pressure. “Hey, Mabel.”

“Yeah.”

Dipper smiles. “Thanks.”

He doesn’t have to say for what. Mabel knows. So she just says, “You’re welcome, ya nerd.” And then they lie down on their sleeping bags and fall asleep peacefully. Mabel dreams about water balloons and popsicles, and nothing is triangle-shaped.

 

—

 

_**The tree is very old.** _

Stan and Ford don’t travel quite as much these days. They still have the Stan O’ War II, and they sail out a few times a year, but on shorter trips, now, and only when the weather is warmer. They’re getting older, and Stan’s knees are getting bad, and Ford’s glasses are much thicker than they used to be.

They’ve made a home base of a cabin at the edge of town, closer to the lake than the Shack. It’s set just far enough into the trees for privacy — for Ford’s experiments he still tinkers with, for Stan’s general disapproval of the public — but close enough for Soos and Melody to stop by whenever they’re needed or wanted, or even when they’re not.

Dipper likes the cabin, likes the corner of the trees it’s tucked into. He and Mabel put on their backpacks and boots and go the long way there from the Shack, hiking along the cliffsides and coming down to the cabin from the back. They see some weird mushrooms and a few deer and some definite manotaur tracks. And then they come to the cabin.

It’s in a clearing in a half-circle of trees, with a dirt road in front of it leading down to the lake, and to town. Their grunkles built the cabin themselves — with some help — when they got back from their first sailing trip ten years ago. It’s nothing fancy, just a simple wooden cabin with a chimney for the wood-burning stove inside and a generator to power the lights and fridge, but it still makes a statement.

They built it around a tree. It’s almost too much of a hippie move for Dipper to still believe Stan agreed to it, but it makes the cabin special. The tree is tall and strong and growing lively even though the width of its trunk suggests it’s older than either of his great-uncles. Most of the branches are high enough to clear the roof, but a couple cut through the inside. Ford had worked them into the rafters of the cabin. And every time Dipper sees it, it reminds him of both his grunkles: old, kind of gnarled, but still vibrant and powerful. It makes a warm, safe feeling bloom in his chest.

He and Mabel circle down around to the front porch, and they knock on the door.

Ford answers, and he’s already smiling. “Dipper!” He grabs Dipper’s hand, and Dipper grips his, grinning back at him. “It’s been too long. And Mabel, come here.”

Dipper steps into the cabin, pulling off his hat to wipe sweat off his forehead. “Sorry we weren’t here at eleven like we said. We decided to hike around. Where’s Grunkle Stan?”

“In the den.” Ford adjusts his glasses, closing the screen door after he and Mabel come inside. “Are you kids hungry? We don’t have anything fresh ready, but I’ve got a cabinet full of ship bread.”

Dipper glances at Mabel, who scrunches up her nose. They both know “ship bread” is just a euphemism for hardtack. “No thanks, Grunkle Ford,” Mabel says. “We packed protein bars for our hike. And a banana!”

“Very well, suit yourselves. Come on and sit down. I’m eager to hear about this journey of yours.”

The cabin isn’t air conditioned, but it stays cool under the shade of the trees, with its windows all opened to circulate the air. They follow Ford into the den. Dipper cracks a small smile at the sight of Stan sitting in his armchair — that same old yellow thing, which Mabel had a fit about and finally re-stuffed three years ago when Stan wouldn’t stop complaining that the threadbare cushion was hurting his ass — sorting an array of fishing lures on the coffee table while casting sniping remarks at a game show on the television. “Come _on_. Colombia’s bordered by Peru, not Chile. I knew that even from jail.” Then he glances up, and his scruffy face brightens with a huge smile. “Kids!”

“Hey Grunkle Stan.”

“Hi Grunkle Stan!” Mabel practically skips over to the armchair, leaning down to put her arms around Stan’s wide shoulders.

“Hey, hey, back on up. Lemme stand up and do this right.”

“You don’t have to get up, Grunkle Stan.”

“If I wanna stand up to hug my niece, I’m gonna stand up to hug my niece. Don’t hug me!” Dipper bite his lip to hold in a laugh and catches Ford’s eye — he’s shaking his head but smiling, too — as Stan eases himself up out of the chair, then holds his arms out. “All right, now you can hug me.” And Mabel laughs and throws her arms around him.

“You smell like a fishing boat.”

“Yeah, well you smell like – uh – a sweaty hiker.”

“Compliment taken.”

Dipper flops down on the couch, Ford sitting next to him, while Stan sits back down in his chair and Mabel curls up cross-legged on the floor between them. Stan mutes the television and meets Dipper’s gaze. “So you’re off to mess around with some supernatural mumbo-jumbo some more, huh kid?”

“Yeah.” Dipper adjusts his hat. “We were both getting kind of… stagnant, I guess, with how our lives were going. Maybe this’ll be better for us.” He glances at Mabel, who smiles at him. “We think it’s gonna be better for us.”

“You told us the basics on the phone,” Ford says. “But do you have a more specific plan? Anything you know you want to track down?”

Dipper shrugs. “Mabel, you tell them.”

“Aw, no, Dipper–”

“C'mon. It’s your plan.” He gives her a reassuring smile. Her furrowed brow relaxes, and it brings a soft feeling into his chest. He’s really, really proud of her for all this. He wants her to take the credit she deserves.

So she takes a breath and looks up at her grunkles and tells them. How they’re going to travel where-ever it feels right to go, keeping their ears to the ground and their eyes peeled and other good cliches like that. How they saved up and pared down over the summer to buy the RV. How they can use everything they’ve learned since they were twelve to help take care of things when they encounter them, whether it’s some asshole ghost or just something on par with a gnome infestation. And, hesitatingly glanced sidelong at Stan, she hems and haws for a bit before mentioning that she’s started learning magic.

Ford congratulates her, but Dipper sees her still eyeing Stan, who’s taking a long swig of Pitt. When he sets down his can, he says, “Like spells and stuff?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“It’s really cool, Grunkle Stan,” Dipper says, jumping in because he can see Mabel’s shoulders rising up around her ears, can see the worry all over her face that Stan thinks it’s stupid. “Mabel’s a really powerful witch. She’s already done all kinds of stuff to help us.”

“It’s not like, um, I don’t wave a wand around or anything. I mean, I could if I wanted, but I don’t. It’s more like—” Mabel’s eyes light up. “It’s like gambling.”

“Come again?” Dipper hasn’t heard this analogy before.

“No, it is. Like, Grunkle Stan, when you’re playing poker you go on your skill as much as you can, right? And if you’re skilled you can win pretty often, but skill only takes you so far because it’s part luck, too. But if you cheat—” Ford makes a disapproving noise, but Mabel keeps going. “—if you cheat, you can stack the odds in your favor and make it even more likely to win.”

“Heh.” Stan takes another sip of Pitt. “Sounds kinda neat.”

Ford narrows his eyes slightly at Mabel. “Mabel, do you really think of magic as a way of _cheating_?”

“Not cheating, exactly, no. But it does help move the odds in your favor. You know, makes the luck part— well, luckier. And now Grunkle Stan doesn’t think it’s total hooey.” Mabel shrugs and leans forward, and the wide collar of her sweatshirt dips down, exposing the top of the tattoo on her sternum.

“Woah! Is that a tattoo, kid?”

Mabel sits up, pressing a hand against her shirt. “Um, ha ha, um—”

“Yeah.” Dipper tugs down the collar of his T-shirt, showing the top of his matching one. “We both got some. Protective sigils to help us out since we’re kind of going looking for trouble. Mabel came up with them.”

Ford is nodding, commenting that it’s a smart move. But Dipper keeps an eye on Stan and Mabel. Stan’s mouth scrunches up a little, and his eyes almost look damp. Then he grins and reaches down, clapping Mabel on the back. “That’s a badass move. I’m proud of you, sweetie.”

The relief is clear in her expression. Mabel’s shoulders relax, and she smiles, and she catches Dipper’s eye and they share a look.

“You’ve thought this through a lot,” Ford says. “Good work, Mabel.” And her smile widens further, her posture opens even more loose and comfortable, and Dipper feels his own head clear of worry when her eyes look so bright and free.

 

–

 

_**A figure at the edge of the woods.** _

They stay through dinner. Ford makes chicken and potatoes, plus green beans from his garden. (“I’ve found that gardening soothes me,” he says. “Which can be necessary when living with Stanley.”) After they eat, Dipper and Stan crack open a couple beers at the kitchen table. Mabel goes out and sits on the porch. She likes a little fresh air after dinner.

She sits, arms hugged around her knees, and looks out across the clearing and the forest. The western part of the sky is just starting to wash pink. Mabel takes in a deep breath of the Oregon air — it just smells _greener_ than California, even in the town Dipper lived in — and lets it out in a contented sigh.

The porch floorboards creak behind her. She turns as Ford sits down on the step next to her, a bit carefully. His knees aren’t bad like Stan’s, but he’s not young anymore, either.

They sit in silence for a few minutes. Ford scratches his chin; Mabel picks at a stray fleck of turquoise nail polish off her thumb.

“I’m incredibly proud of you, Mabel,” he says eventually.

She smiles. “That means a lot.”

“It’s impressive how much foresight you’ve shown. I know you like being more of a free-spirited improviser.” He chuckles. “Which has come in handy plenty of times, I know. But for this sort of thing… well, I’m just proud of how much you’re doing for you and your brother.”

Mabel feels a surge of emotions, a bunch of them tangling all together in her stomach. She bites her lip, hesitating. Then she says, “He gets really bad sometimes.”

Ford starts to ask her something. What she means, most likely. But he stops. He doesn’t have to ask. “For how long?” he asks instead.

“I mean, stuff always happened sometimes. Night terrors and stuff. Ever since… y'know. The summer we met you. To both of us, sometimes, but more often for him.” She looks up at the sky. “But in the past few years it’s gotten worse. Still nightmares and night terrors, but now he gets…” She sighs and twists her fingers together. “Bad. So anxious he can’t eat, and then he panics in waves for hours. Or really depressed. Or both at once. He gets scared, like this primal awful fear that history’s gonna repeat itself, I think. It’s like everything good about that summer vanishes and his brain just crowds itself up with every messed up, terrifying, traumatic part.”

Next to her, Ford sighs softly. “I can understand that. But why didn’t you tell us?”

Mabel shrugs. “He never wanted to burden you with it. And since he didn’t tell you, I didn’t feel like it was my place to.”

“But you’re telling me now.”

“Because it’s a big part of this. All of this.” Mabel finally leans back, resting back on her hands. “Don’t get me wrong, he’s fine most of the time. As fine as any of us are. But I just… I just want to be with him. To make sure he stays okay. To try to protect him when he’s not. Because I can. I do. When he gets really bad, I’m the one who can ground him.”

Ford is silent for a long moment. Then he says, “I’m considering all the different advice I could give you, but it all comes down to this: Don’t repeat my mistakes.” Mabel looks at him. His eyes look sad. “With the supernatural, and with my brother. I made a lot of mistakes, which you know all too well. Try not to repeat them. Try to do things better.” But then he smiles, the sadness clearing away a little. “Though it already sounds like you’re more than on the right track.”

Mabel smiles back. “Thanks, Grunkle Ford. I’m really glad we have your blessing.”

“Of course, Mabel.”

They go back inside not long after, and she and Dipper stay a little longer, all of them talking and laughing and looking through their grunkles’ scrapbook of the latest adventure. But they’re sleeping at the Shack again tonight before heading out in the morning, so eventually they say goodnight and goodbye. Mabel hugs Stan, pressing her face into his shoulder, as he tells her, “Knock 'em dead, pumpkin.” And when she says goodbye to Ford, he takes her hands between his and says, “Be good,” and she knows he isn’t talking about minding her manners, and she nods.

One more night in the Mystery Shack. It’s just as peaceful as the night before, and Mabel and Dipper fall asleep next to each other on the floor again. Mabel sleeps soundly until she wakes up with a profound need to pee. She creeps out to the bathroom, not turning on the lights so as not to bother Dipper. This Shack is in her blood; she knows the way to the bathroom in the dark like it’s part of her.

She sneaks back into the room and sighs quietly. She’s a little jazzed awake, now, from being up. It would be nice to sit up for a little while and enjoy the peace and quiet until she’s ready to fall back asleep.

Mabel stands by the window, arms wrapped around herself, and looks out on the lawn and the treeline. The moon isn’t as bright as last night, but she can still make out all the features around the Shack. Everything is still and dim, and it starts letting sleepiness creep back in behind her eyes.

Then motion at the treeline catches her eyes. They snap wide open, any trace of sleep gone. She sucks in a thin breath.

Someone, or something, is standing at the edge of the trees. It’s just under their cover, so she can’t quite see it. But it looks weird and wrong, its arms too long for the rest of its body. And it’s facing the Shack.

Her heart is thundering. She’s seen plenty of strange things, but something about this silhouette sends immediate primal fear heebie-jeebies racing up her spine. Her stomach turns and her fingers clench hard against her arms.

Then the figure shifts, moves, and goes deeper into the trees, and Mabel can’t see it anymore. She stands stock-still, hearing the shallow rush of her breath. She swallows and calms down her breathing, quiets it so it’s not so noisy. She debates waking Dipper.

But she stands there, and stands there, and stands there until her knees and back ache, and the figure doesn’t return. So she eventually lies back down on her sleeping bag, staring at the ceiling, her shoulders tight.

Mabel doesn’t end up sleeping much that night at all.

They leave in the morning, with fond goodbyes to Soos and Melody and the Shack itself. In the bright sunlight, and with a fresh cup of coffee in hand and a belly full of eggs and strawberries, Mabel has trouble still feeling inordinately spooked out by whatever she saw last night. It’s not like Gravity Falls isn’t full of weirdness, or like her loved ones aren’t well-equipped to handle said weirdness. She still takes a moment aside with Soos to mention that she saw something lurking around in the woods, but he promises her to keep an eye out, and that seems good enough.

Dipper and Mabel get set back up in the Warrior. Mabel pops in one of her mixes, and Dipper adjusts the visor. “Well, Mabel,” he says, “ready to actually get this thing started?”

She looks at him, his still-kinda-messy hair under his cap and his bright smile. Her heart grows three sizes, and she can’t help smiling at him, too. “Let’s hit the road, Jack,” she says, putting her feet up on the dashboard. “I’ve got a good feeling about today.”


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happens when two people with a ton of supernatural-related baggage go looking for the supernatural. Two parts shenanigans, five parts emotional issues, three parts spookiness & horror, two parts hurt/comfort, four parts heartwarming love, intimacy, support. (Contains a variety of pinecest.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There’s some body horror/mild gore in this chapter. It’s not too intense (frankly because I get panicky and sick about that kind of stuff, so I had to keep it tame), but it is there, so just take care in the beginning of the fourth section (”Driving for hours through mountains”) if that stuff bothers you.

_**Horses anticipating a storm.** _

The road has been kind to Mabel and Dipper so far. The beginning of their journey feels more like a vacation than supernatural-hunter work. Nothing ooky seems to be rearing its head. Mabel is enjoying the time they spend driving with the windows down and music blasting, sitting at the cramped little RV table eating cup noodles at one in the morning, exploring the different towns they stop in. It’s been nice.

Nice enough that she’s just the eensiest bit anxious that nothing has gone funky on them yet.

It’s their second day in Montana. The sky is hard, clear blue without a cloud in sight, and the diner where they’re having brunch is quiet and sunny. They leave a generous tip, wave good-bye to the pink-apron-and-green-eyeglasses-wearing owner who’s putting pies in the showcase, and head out in good spirits.

This town is fairly small — not teensy old-west-ghost-town tiny, but small — and walking down the main street is relaxing. Mabel rolls up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, trying to feel every little bit of sun.

She and Dipper continue their spirited debate about brunch choices (he insists brunch is for foods that are somewhere between breakfasty and lunchy — “That’s why it’s called _brunch_ , Mabel” — while she maintains brunch is just an excuse for even more breakfast foods). They turn down a side street. Mabel laughs at Dipper’s indignant expression and considers asking him if he’s anxious, too, about how smoothly things are going. But she decides not to. If he’s in a good place, she wants him to stay there. No need to bring him down.

“Wait. Stop.” Dipper holds out his arm, stopping Mabel in her tracks.

“Ow. Jeez, brobro, you don’t have to make your point with your elbow.”

“No, not that— look.” He points at the sky. There’s a cluster of clouds hanging directly over the town. “Those definitely weren’t in the sky before. Like not even five minutes ago.”

Mabel squints. She isn’t sure, but— “Are they getting darker?”

“Oh man.”

They are. As she and Dipper stand there, watching, the clouds take on a gray tinge that deepens and deepens. And as they darken, they spread, roiling out across the sky. Mabel feels goosebumps rising on her arms, and it’s not just from the sudden drop in temperature. Well, she did kind of ask for something weird to happen.

Around them, people are ducking inside as the first raindrops start to fall. Dipper takes off his hat and puts it on Mabel’s head, then pulls the hood of his hoodie up on his own head. He takes her hand and says, “C'mon,” and starts walking briskly down the road.

“Are we going to the center of this thing?”

“You’ve got it.” Dipper glances at her as lightning flashes overhead, followed almost immediately by a crack of thunder that makes them both flinch. “A thunderstorm that pops up out of nowhere on a cloudless day? Pretty weird to me.”

Something hard pelts Mabel’s shoulder, then her arm, the back of her neck. “Is it hailing?”

“Let’s go.” Dipper breaks into a run, and Mabel matches his pace.

The clouds are definitely churning out from a central point. She and Dipper navigate down the streets, cut through a couple alleys, and finally end up at what seems to be the center. Mabel’s breathing hard, her arms stinging from the hail and her hair wet and messy down her back. Rainwater drips off the brim of Dipper’s cap.

They’ve come to a halt in front of a run-down apartment building. It’s definitely lived in — one of the windows has flower boxes under it, and the building number is freshly painted — but it’s in an area that’s seen better days.

Mabel’s gaze darts to one of the ground-floor windows. She tugs on Dipper’s sleeve. “Look.” The window is open despite the storm, and blueish-white smoke is curling out of it.

They creep across the street to the building, sidling up against its outer wall and shifting close to the window. Mabel leans over and peeks inside as stealthily as she can. Her eyes adjust to the dimmer light inside, and then she squeezes Dipper’s hand hard.

A woman is inside. She stands in front of a low table covered in all sorts of things, bundles of plant clippings and bowls full of stuff and jars of powders and what look like a couple empty wine bottles. A bundle of dried herbs rests in the one of the bowls, burning and giving off the smoke they saw from the window. There’s a big basin on the floor. The woman stirs something in it continuously and mutters in a steady rhythm. She stamps her foot, and a millisecond later, lightning and thunder follow.

Mabel whips around from the window to face Dipper. “She’s a witch,” she squeaks.

“Are you sure?” he whispers.

“Uh, yeah, pretty sure someone stirring a cauldron and calling up a storm out of nowhere classifies as a witch!” Mabel nudges him so they scoot a little further from the window. “The question now is do we need to do anything?”

Dipper raises his eyebrows. “Why wouldn’t we?”

Mabel shrugs. “I mean, it’s a storm. It’s spooky that she called it up from nothing like that, but thunderstorms are thunderstorms. Maybe the town needs rain and she’s trying to help out.”

A gust of wind roars down the street, almost pushing Mabel off her feet into Dipper. He steadies her, and they watch a tree sway over so far it’s nearly bent in half, hail pelting down all the while.

“I dunno, Mabel,” he whispers. “This seems like a seriously angry storm.”

She bites her lip. She doesn’t want to jump to conclusions. Especially not about a fellow witch. Shouldn’t they stick together or something? She doesn’t know. She’s never really known other witches and is a gigantic newbie herself. Maybe the storm is just getting a little out of hand.

There’s a sharp cracking sound that’s not thunder. Mabel and Dipper both whip their heads around and duck just in time to avoid a huge slab of siding cartwheeling down the street. Mabel can see the house further down where the siding just peeled clean off.

“Okay,” she says, voice a little shaky. “Maybe we should do something. But what? Knock on her door?”

“That would be more polite,” says a voice behind them.

Mabel feels her shoulders tense and sees Dipper’s eyes widen. She turns around. The witch is leaning out the window, glaring at them. Her blonde hair whips around her chin in the wind. “If you’re gonna be a rude dickbag and spy on me, you might as well come inside.”

“Um…” Mabel glances at Dipper, who looks as disarmed as she feels. “Uh, okay.”

“I’m the first apartment on the left. I’ll unlock the door. Hey, hey!” The witch points at Mabel. “Only you. He stays outside.”

“Are you freaking kidding me?” Mabel scowls. “It’s practically a hurricane out here.” She’s nearly yelling to be heard, now, the wind and rain have increased so much.

The witch shakes her head. “I don’t want his bad energy up in my space.”

“Bad energy?” Dipper shoots back.

“His energy is fine. Let us both in.” Mabel stares at the witch, narrowing her eyes a little, trying to push push push.

The witch frowns, but finally she says, “Ugh, fine. Just hurry up. I have to get back to this thing before it blows my shutters off.” She disappears back inside the window, and a moment later the wind eases up by a fraction.

Mabel glances up at Dipper. She sees the question on his face, but she doesn’t have an answer, and they may not have time right now, and also she doesn’t want to examine it too hard. So she takes his hand, and they go inside the building.

In the hallway, the wind is still moaning around the other walls, the rain and hail audible even here on the ground floor. But when Mabel opens the door to the witch’s apartment and walks inside, the sounds fall away. In here, it barely sounds like more than a soft summer rainstorm.

She stands with Dipper, still gripping his hand, both dripping wet on a wooden floor. It’s the living room, apparently, and it looks like a pretty normal living room with paintings of the ocean over the couch and a TV in the corner. Normal aside from the metal tub in the middle of the floor and the coffee table moved in front of it, all cluttered up with witchy stuff.

The witch is back at the basin, in her tank top and cutoff shorts, stirring the basin and occasionally stamping her foot, which brings a roll of thunder. She’s not muttering her chant anymore, though. Instead she says, “So what do you want, anyway?”

Mabel isn’t sure what to say, really. Dipper’s fingers feel like iron bars between her own. She scrabbles for words, then manages, “Well, this storm is pretty messed up. Like, stuff is getting kind of destroyed out there, and I’m pretty sure it’s gonna get bad enough that someone might get hurt.”

“Yes. And?”

“And so maybe cut it out?” Dipper’s voice is carrying a harsh edge. “I mean, are you trying to get people hurt?”

“That’s not the goal, no,” the witch says. “Property damage is the main goal.”

“But you don’t seem to care,” Dipper continues. “If people get hurt.”

The witch rolls her eyes. “Nobody’s gonna get hurt. Probably. You two are being a couple of babies. What’s it to you, anyway? You’re not from around here. Believe me, I know every face in this godforsaken town.”

“I’m a witch, too,” Mabel blurts out. “And what you’re doing is wrong.”

“Oh sweetie.” The witch grins wryly at her and gives the basin an extra-big stir. “There’s no code of conduct for witches. That’s a fluffy-bunny fairy tale.”

“I know that.” Mabel feels her face getting hot. She can also feel Dipper’s tension radiating through his body next to her.

The witch blows a tuft of hair out of her face, turning back to her basin. “So what, you kids are trying to play hero? Blow into town and stop the big bad witch calling up a storm to punish the assholes who live here?” She laughs. “What’re you gonna do if I say no — tie me to a chair? Kill me? Get over yourselves. I have my reasons, and it’s a free country.”

“But you’re using magic to hurt people,” Dipper says. “People who don’t know about magic, so they have no way to defend themselves or fight back. We do know. So it _is_ our job to do something.”

The witch snaps her head around to glare at him. Her eyes are glittering with anger, and Mabel feels a chill. “Don’t be so self-righteous. I can tell you’re not so perfect. It’s all over your energy pattern. And besides, you have no idea what these people have done. This is deserved vengeance, believe me.”

“Everyone seems friendly enough,” Mabel says. She’s grasping for something, anything, to counter with, because talking this woman down seems like the only option. What else can she do? “We were just at that diner— the lady who owns it, with the green glasses—”

“Marilyn?” The witch stops stirring her basin for a moment. She leans on the stick she’s stirring with — it’s a broom, Mabel realizes — and looks hard at Mabel. “She was the head juror on my case.” She narrows her eyes at Mabel, and Mabel can feel her trying to say things without saying them. “Said the only evidence was my testimony, and that wasn’t good enough for them. She looked me right in the eye and smiled when she read the unanimous verdict to let that son of a bitch walk.”

Something cold creeps down Mabel’s spine. She swallows. Her mouth feels dry. The witch stares at her another moment, then goes back to stirring her storm.

Mabel can feel Dipper staring at her. Her throat feels weird, a big old lump forming in it. She struggles to talk around it. “It’s still not right,” she manages. “Every single person in this town can’t have been— there must be someone innocent. Who doesn’t deserve this. Is it really worth it to punish them, too?” The witch ignores her. “I’m not saying— I’m not saying that the people who hurt you are innocent. I’m just saying—”

“Let me guess: Violence isn’t the answer. Turn the other cheek. Forgiveness is for yourself, not for others. Blah blah blah.” The witch’s brow is furrowed, her mouth twisted in a frown. She sighs, letting go of the broom, letting it fall. “Fuck. You’ve thrown me totally off my rhythm.” She walks away, goes to the window and looks outside. The wind tosses her hair. After a moment she turns back around. “Maybe that’s enough. Ed’s house has maybe five tiles left on the roof, and I know he can’t afford to replace them. That might be good enough.”

Dipper starts to say something, but Mabel presses his hand to tell him to hold back. She just— she doesn’t know. It’s still wrong, she thinks, but other things are wrong, too. Some things are more wrong than others. And some things…

“I feel really stupid,” she finally says.

The witch looks at her. She doesn’t seem as angry, now. She just looks tired. “I get it. You’re a couple of kids with some supernatural shit under your belt, you saw bad juju going down, you wanted to help out the poor little town since you know about the weird stuff. I really do get it. But it’s not like I’m up here killing anyone. It’s just really not any of your business.” She grabs a bowl off the table and sprinkles of handful of some powder into the basin. “Just quit being so naive.”

“We’re not naive.” Dipper’s voice sounds tight. “We’ve faced way worse than you.”

The witch raises her eyebrows. “Yeah, I can tell. That’s why you need to quit being naive. I can tell you’ve been through some majorly weird shit. So I feel like you oughtta already be more aware that this stuff isn’t so simple.” She looks up again. “Now can you get out of my apartment? I need to shut this spell down so it doesn’t get all out of hand.”

Mabel’s chest still feels all weird and fluttery, and not in a good way. “You promise you’re done with this storm?”

“Oh my god, yes, I promise, I pinky-promise, cross my heart hope to die stick a needle in my fucking eye. Good job, you stopped the big mean witch, have a gold star and go save Timmy from a well.” The witch frowns at them again. “Seriously. Get out before I make you get out.”

Neither of them say anything. They turn together and go out the apartment, and then out of the building.

It’s still raining, and thunder is still rumbling, but the hail is gone and the wind has died down, and the rain is soft now instead of hard and torrential. Dipper and Mabel start walking back the way they came. They pass buildings missing chunks of siding, patches of roof tiles, with broken chimneys and broken windows and car hoods deeply dented by hail. But there are no sirens to be heard; there are no apparent tragedies. Mabel finally lets go of Dipper’s hand. Her fingers ache and feel stiff from clenching his hand so tightly for so long.

A lot of thoughts are circling around her mind, clanging against each other. The weather witch’s power, to draw down such a horrible storm. The implications of why she did it in the first place. The fact that, up against another human being, there was really only so much they could do anyway. “Tie me to a chair? Kill me?” No. Of course not. But what, then?

Their first real encounter didn’t go even a little bit how Mabel expected.

“I’m glad she didn’t really hurt anyone,” Mabel finally says. But her voice sounds small.

Dipper puts his hand on her back. He doesn’t say anything.

 

—

 

_**One foot in another world.** _

They drive into Idaho that evening and find a park where they get the Warrior into a parking space for the night. Mabel changes into her nightshirt early, and Dipper turns on their little electric stove long enough to make them eggs and toast for dinner. Mabel does her nightly ritual while he cooks. She takes a tupperware full of some kind of powder and sprinkles it outside in a circle around the Warrior, then comes back inside and says a short chant while she smears some kind of oil on a tealight candle. She lights it, leaving it in the middle of the table. It’s a protective process to keep them safe, being parked out in public all night long.

They eat dinner in relative silence. Dipper mostly stares at his eggs. He can’t get that blonde weather witch out of his head. The way she scowled at them. The way she seemed to stare right through him.

“I keep thinking about what she said,” he finally says.

Mabel looks up. “About us being naive?”

“No. Well, yeah, that too, but that isn’t what I meant. I meant how she said I had bad energy. What does that even mean?” He tries to make the question come out joking or sarcastic, but it sounds wistful enough to betray him.

Mabel sneaks a hand across the table, laying it over his. “You don’t have bad energy. You have good energy. Awesome energy.”

“Mabes, she knew stuff. And she saw something… bad in me.” He doesn’t want to say it, but there’s a heaviness settling down all over his body and mind, pressing down and dragging him down with it. He feels like shit.

Mabel sets down her fork and reaches her other hand across the table, too, taking his hand between hers. Her fingertips skate lightly over his palm. “Look at me.” He looks up from her hands to meet her gaze. She’s steady and soft, staring back at him. “There’s not a single thing wrong with you. Not like that. Maybe all she saw is the stuff you carry with you. Well, none of that is your fault, and it doesn’t make you bad. She was angry. We don’t know what she meant. But I do know that you’re good. Every bit of you is good, and I love you.”

His stomach turns over. He moves his hands to hold hers, too. “I guess you’re right.”

“I know I’m right.” She smiles a little. “I mean, hey, our whole family is kinda weird, y'know? We’re Pines. And that makes us basically awesome, but also pretty stinking weird. It’s okay, broseph.”

Dipper nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.” One corner of his mouth quirks up in a half-smile. “We do come from a line of weirdness, huh?”

“Oh, undoubtedly. The Pines family was steeped in woo-woo before we were even born.” Mabel leans back in her seat, one eyebrow cocked. “Hm. I have an idea. Let’s get these plates cleared off the table.”

“Ah, are you gonna try to wipe the floor with me in gin rummy to take my mind off things?”

She grins. “Nope. Clear the table, Dippingsauce. I’ll be right back.”

She scurries up to the loft bed over the cab. She made herself a nest up there when they first set up the Warrior. It’s got layers and layers of blankets over the thin mattress, a bunch of pillows, and a string of battery-operated fairy lights strung above the windows that go around all three sides. There’s just enough room for her to sit upright, and she stores all kinds of stuff under the pillows. She’s digging for something now as Dipper folds the paper plates into the trash can.

He sits back down at the table, and after a moment Mabel comes back down to join him, carrying a small box. “Your tarot cards?”

“Yep!” She grins, sliding into her seat. “I’m gonna do a reading for you. It’ll be fun.”

Dipper squints at the box. “Don’t you usually use those ones with the 1950s ladies on them?”

“Oh yeah, I love my housewives deck. But I think this one is better suited for you.”

“How many of these things do you have?”

“Only three. Shush your face. I’m gonna shuffle.”

Dipper watches her take out the cards, shuffle them, the tip of her tongue poking out between her teeth as she focuses. It’s really cute. He sits with his chin in his hand, watching her, already soothed just by the rhythm of her actions. Then she sets the deck down and tells him to cut it. He picks up a little less than half the cards and sets them to the side; Mabel picks up the ones he left behind and plops them on top, then taps everything back into place. “Cool. Now I’ll lay it out.”

She flips over the cards one by one, laying them face-up on the table. This deck looks a lot different than her others. He sees her with that 50s housewife one all the time, and sometimes she also uses one that looks pretty much like the tarot decks he always sees on TV or in movies. But this one is a lot different. It still has people in the drawings, but they’re all like the blocky silhouettes on the pedestrian-crossing signs at crosswalks, or on bathroom doors.

Mabel keeps going, laying down a total of ten cards. Then she folds her hands and leans forward, staring intently at the cards on the table.

Dipper watches her. Her gaze flicks from one card to another. She stares at one of them for a long time, her brow furrowing, and Dipper chews his fingernails. Some of her pep has dissolved as she’s been staring at the cards. Dipper shifts in his seat and is about to say something when Mabel lifts a finger and says, “Sorry bro, just another minute. This is just… um, I probably should have done something… simpler.”

That’s all she says. So Dipper keeps chewing his fingernails. Some of the cards look fine – not that he knows what any of them mean – but there’s one near the top of her layout, closest to him, that has a figure splayed on the ground with a bunch of swords stuck into its back. It gives him the heebie-jeebies, cartoonishly simple though the drawing may be.

Finally Mabel leans back in her seat and sighs. “Okay,” she says. “So. Yeah, I should’ve done a fun little three-card spread instead of this. But, um, I can still tell you about it if you want.”

“Yeah. Break it down for me, Mabes.”

She pauses again, biting her lip. Then she says, “So this middle line of cards is kind of your current situation.” She puts her finger over two cards laid crossed over each other. “You know you’re in a place now where you’re supposed to take charge and like, make the call on what’s right or wrong. But you aren’t sure. Like you know it’s a thing you want to do, but you’re conflicted about whether you can do it, or maybe how you should do it.”

Dipper feels his stomach stink a little. Mabel slides her finger to the card on the left. “The whole reason you can even do this is in the first place is because of the stuff we’ve already been through. Especially beating Bill. And, y'know, all of that. It kind of… gave you the authority to be able to do this, what we’re doing now. And…” She moves her finger to the card on the right. “It’s gonna be a lot of trial and error to figure out exactly what your new role is.”

Dipper shrugs and picks at his cuticle. “I mean, you know all that about me.”

“Well, duh. But that’s what’s here, brobro. The cards aren’t talking about your writing or, I dunno, your love life.”

He doesn’t want to admit that sinking sensation he had when she phrased things pretty much exactly how he’s been thinking it in his own head. “Okay. Read on, Madame Mabel.”

She sticks her tongue out at him, scrunching her nose. But then her expression sombers as she taps the cards above and below the middle row – that one with all the swords that’s making him nervous, and then below, a figure hanging upside-down. “Um, this part is…” Her finger lingers on the one with all the swords. Her bright blue nail polish stands out against the reds and yellows of the card. “It’s…”

She’s biting her lip, and Dipper feels heaviness creeping into his shoulders. “C'mon, Mabes,” he says softly.

“It’s like you want yourself to suffer,” she blurts out. She looks up at him, eyes wide, like she’s scared she shouldn’t have said it.

Dipper draws in a slow breath. “Keep going,” he says, keeping his voice even.

Mabel stares at him for a moment, but then nods. She ducks her head. “Um, it’s like you want to suffer. Like you’re pushing yourself to your limits even though you know you only have so much to give.” She moves her hand to tap her finger on the upside-down person. “But it’s like… Okay, so this card basically is about new perspectives, basically. So, like maybe you’re putting yourself in a position that you know hurts you, but it’s because you’re trying to make a shift in your thinking or your behavior or your, well, perspective. I dunno, maybe you think if you push yourself like this, it’ll help you figure out that part from the beginning about not knowing how to go about the role you’re taking on.” She glances up. “Do you want me to keep going?”

His hands are flat on the table. “Yeah. Go ahead.”

She bites her lip again, then gestures to the vertical line of four cards running alongside the others. “This is all… Basically you want to ultimately end up in like, this good, cool-headed place where you can like, find these bad situations we’re kind of looking for and handle them the right way. And you can do it if you tap into the right things. But there’s gonna be a lot of external stuff putting pressure on you, too, lots of… lots of influences, you know? And if you don’t tap into the right stuff, it’s probably just gonna keep you feeling trapped.”

Dipper presses a hand to his mouth, rubs it over his chin. He clears his throat. “What do you mean by the right stuff?”

Mabel lays her finger on one of the cards. It looks like a wooden staff sprouting leaves. “Remember when we were kids,” she says slowly, “in Gravity Falls, but before Bill? You’d find mysteries and stuff everywhere, and you got so excited about it. Just all hyped to explore and investigate and learn and figure out how to solve the problem.” She taps her finger. “Think about that.”

There’s a sour taste in Dipper’s mouth. “I got us into a lot of trouble that way.”

She smiles a little. “Yeah, but you didn’t know any better. That’s the difference. You know better now. You know how bad stuff can get. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still have that… that joy about it.”

“It’s hard to be joyful about shit that can kill you.” He doesn’t mean for his voice to come out so harsh, but it does. He flinches a little at his own words.

It if bothers Mabel, she doesn’t show it. “Not even about the spooky stuff itself. But about the process. You’re really smart, Dipper, and really curious, and passionate, and figuring out problems is exciting for you. Just… just keep in touch with that part of yourself.” She draws back her hand and sits back in her seat, peering up at him. “Okay?”

He takes another deep breath. “And the cards told you all this? Not just you knowing me?”

Mabel smiles. “Well, yeah, me knowing you lets me get a lot more specific. But like I said, the cards chose the topic.” She stares at him for a minute. Then she stands up and comes over to his side of the table. She takes his face in her hands, gently. Her palms are soft and warm against his cheeks, and his eyes flutter closed as she leans down and presses a kiss to his forehead. When she straightens up, Dipper leans forward, resting his forehead against her stomach. She wraps her arms around his shoulders and lets him rest there.

He knows her; he can practically feel her wanting to ask if it’s true, if he’s rushing into something that he knows is going to make him suffer. But she knows him, too, and she doesn’t ask, sparing him the strain of having to talk about it. And he loves her so much for that. They stay like that for a while, until Mabel’s tealight candle is burning low and dim.

 

—

 

_**Face on the other side of a dark window.** _

The first thing they hear about in this city is the haunted house.

They don’t even have to go asking for it. They just find a little restaurant for breakfast, and when the server hears that they’re traveling, her eyes go wide and she says, “So you don’t know about the Housman house?”

Mabel looks up at her and scrunches her nose. “The house man house?”

“No, the Housman house.” The server clicks her pen. “It’s the most haunted place in this part of Idaho. Kind of our main attraction here in town. You should go by if you like scary stuff.”

Dipper raises his eyebrows at Mabel across their menus. “What kind of haunting is it?”

“Oh, super scary. The Housman family used to live there but moved out because it was so awful.”

“Did anyone get hurt?”

“No. Can ghosts hurt you?” The server clicks her pen more rapidly. “I didn’t think they could actually hurt you. But, y'know, they say it was just super haunted. I guess it got to be too much, so the family moved into a duplex over on Sussex. But they say the house is still super haunted. They can’t rent it or anything.”

Mabel grins at Dipper. “I’ll have the Triple Stack pancakes with bacon and a fruit cup, and also directions to this house, please.”

It’s ten-thirty in the morning and already hot by the time they pull the Warrior down the road the server wrote down. They park across the street and stare at the house from the cabin. The lawn is overgrown but the house is nondescript, a standard two-story place with white siding and blue shutters. “Doesn’t look haunted,” Mabel says.

“C'mon. Anywhere can be haunted no matter what it looks like.” Dipper leans over, putting his elbow on her arm rest. “You wanna go check it out?”

“I guess.” Mabel looks up at one of the second-story windows. She’s not scared, exactly, but she hasn’t dealt with ghosts as much as Dipper has. Besides, she had a dream last night that was kind of spooky. It was just sort of a replay of that night before they left Gravity Falls, when she saw something weird out in the trees. Nothing funky, just her brain dredging it back up again, but it seems to have left her the teensiest bit jumpy now in the face of actual spooky stuff. She stares at the empty window above them and scrunches her nose. Don’t be a weenie, Mabel. “Can we go inside, or do we have to just— SHIT.”

Adrenaline bolts into her bloodstream. Up in the window, a pale face is staring back at her.

She whips around, grabbing Dipper’s arm. “Dipper. Do you see that?”

He’s staring up past her, eyes wide. “Uh, yeah Mabes, it’s hard to miss. Shit, it’s gone.” Mabel peeks back over her shoulder, heart beating hard; the window is empty.

She laughs. “Oh my god. That scared me so bad.”

“Relax, sister. The waitress said it’s not violent.” Dipper taps his fingers on Mabel’s knee. “Y'know, she said the Housmans had to move out. I wonder if we got ahold of them if they’d want us to clear the place out for them.”

“Ooh!” Mabel sits upright, grinning. “That’s a good idea. Our first ghost bust!”

Dipper pulls out his phone. “She said they moved onto Sussex. Let’s figure out where it is and see if we can track them down.”

It proves easier than anticipated. Apparently Mrs. Housman is a prominent local dentist, and Mr. Housman is a big name in real estate. Dipper drives the Warrior over to the real estate office, and they manage to secure an appointment that afternoon. They kill a few hours playing cards, then when the time comes, they head into the office.

George Housman is a small man with a thick shock of dark hair and a solid handshake when he greets Mabel and Dipper. They sit down across from his desk, and he opens with, “So what can we help you two with today? A nice first home, maybe?”

Mabel shoots Dipper an awkward smile. He scratches the back of his head and says, “Actually, sir, we were hoping we could help you.”

“Oh?”

Dipper explains their spook-busting experience — in very general terms because this total stranger real estate agent doesn’t really need to know about the Oregon apocalypse that almost killed them when they were twelve — and Mr. Housman goes very still. Finally he says, “You really think you can help? Nobody’s been willing to try.”

“What exactly does the ghost do?” Mabel asks.

“Well, none of us ever got hurt while we lived there. Not physically. But a lot of general haunting things. Pictures falling off the walls, appliances turning on and off, doors banging, the fridge made a banging sound. Lots of banging. Things wouldn’t be where you left them. The kids said they saw things at night that made them too scared to sleep.”

“What sorts of things?” Dipper asks.

“Just a figure walking down the hall. As I said, no physical threats. But it scared the kids too much, and to be honest the noise and everything moving got unbearable.” He leans his elbows on his desk. “We’d be so grateful if you could help us. We loved that house, but even if we don’t move back, it’d be nice to at least be able to sell it. We could compensate you.”

Dipper waves a hand. “No need for that.” Mabel glares at him sidelong — compensation wouldn’t be the worst thing ever — but it’d be rude to say it now that Dipper’s already said no. Oh well. “All we need is access to the house and we’ll do our best to get the thing out of there for you.”

Mr. Housman smiles. His crow’s-feet crinkle up. “Thank you.”

By six o'clock, they’re standing in front of the house. Mabel has her backpack, full of things they might need. “Let’s just do this before it gets dark,” Mabel says. “Chasing out a ghost at midnight feels just a liiiiittle too spooky, even for us.”

“I dunno. It might be cooler that way. But it’s not necessary to wait, so we may as well.” Dipper grins and holds up the key Mr. Housman gave them. “Ready?”

Mabel takes a deep breath and lets it out. She gives a thumbs-up, and she and Dipper climb the front steps and go inside.

The house is empty and quiet and dusty. It looks a lot like someone just moved out or is about to just move in, except for the dust. Dipper flicks a light switch — an overhead light in the entry way turns on. “So far so good.”

They set up camp in the living room. Mabel lights a candle and pulls out a bundle of dried cedar leaves, igniting it with the candle flame and letting it smoke and smolder in a small ashtray. Dipper swings his arms a few times, loosening up his shoulders. Then he calls out in a firm voice, “We ask anything inhabiting this house to please move on. This is not your home. Return this house to its owners and go peacefully.”

Mabel scratches a scab on her knee and looks around. Nothing happens. “Do you think it’s here?” she asks.

“Well yeah, where else would it go?” Dipper clears his throat. “Let’s just wait and see.”

A loud banging sounds in the kitchen, and both of them jump. “Jeez,” Mabel says, pressing a hand to her chest.

“We claim this house for the Housmans,” Dipper calls out. “Move on to your own plane and leave this plane be.”

More banging. The light overhead flickers. Mabel looks up at Dipper. “Um, is that a no?”

Dipper blanches. “Oh shit. Um, stay there Mabes. Start waving the smoke around and thinking banishy thoughts.” He walks past where she’s kneeling by the candle and goes over to the staircase.

“Woah woah woah, where are you going?”

He jerks his thumb toward the stairs. “I, uh, saw something. Something walking up this way. So I’m gonna go look around upstairs.”

“Alone?”

“Mr. Housman said the ghost isn’t physically violent. I’ll be okay. Just keep at it, Mabel.” And he turns and goes up the stairs two at a time.

Mabel turns back to the candle, muttering a few choice words to herself about impulsive brothers. Still, it’s good to see him excited about this. That’s what she had wanted, after all. She wafts more of the smoke upwards and thinks, as Dipper recommended, banishy thoughts.

She can hear him walking around upstairs. His muffled voice is just audible, though she can’t make out what he’s saying. There’s a bang overhead that makes her jump, but Dipper keeps talking, so she guesses he’s okay. Mabel narrows her eyes as she stands up and starts walking around the room, wafting smoke into all the corners. Her line of thought drifts from specifically banishing thoughts into something more like _if you put so much as a scratch on my brother I’ll cross over to the spirit plane myself and put your head through the drywall._

More banging from upstairs. The living room light flickers on and off and makes a buzzing noise. The primal part of Mabel’s brain, the part that still operates on instinct somewhere back there, is pumping her full of adrenaline and begging to run away. But her conscious mind is mostly pissed off, which she’s finding kind of helpful. She’s just about ready to yell something over the banging noises when Dipper clatters down the stairs and skids to a stop in the middle of the living room. He looks a little scared and a lot exhilarated.

“Business time,” he says breathlessly. “This thing doesn’t want to get out, so we’ve gotta go hard-core banishing.”

“Right-o.” Mabel grabs the carton of coarse salt out of her backpack, then takes out a brass bell and hands it to Dipper. “Let’s get on it.”

Dipper stands in the middle of the room, ringing the bell once every ten seconds or so. The clear sound vibrates throughout the room. He’s ordering the ghost to leave in a solid, no-nonsense tone, and Mabel walks around him in a circle, scattering salt all over the floor. Dipper tells the spirit it’s not welcome, it has no place, it needs to leave now.

The banging sounds get louder and closer. It sounds like someone is hitting the walls all around them with a sledgehammer. Mabel’s heart is racing as she thinks banishy, banishy thoughts, as the smoke drifts through the room, as Dipper rings the bell to clarify the air. At one point, glancing at Dipper, she sees a figure standing behind him, its face close to him. She gets a glimpse of its face — it looks furious, and frightening, the mouth pulled down and contorted strangely. But when she blinks it’s gone, though not without a fresh jolt of cold adrenaline through her chest.

Everything gets louder and closer and feels like it’s practically on top of them. Mabel grits her teeth and throws a giant handful of salt. The candle flame stutters, and Dipper rings the bell one more time and takes a deep breath and absolutely bellows, “Get _out_!”

There’s a rush like a cold wind around Mabel, and then suddenly everything stops. She blinks, still holding a handful of salt. The noises are gone, the light is on, the candle flame is steady, and the air feels clear and calm. She looks at Dipper, who looks kind of disheveled. “Did we do it?”

He pauses, glancing up, listening. “Yeah. It’s gone.”

“I thought so. I mean, I feel that, too. I just wondered.”

Dipper grins, sets down the bell, then comes in and sweeps Mabel up in his arms, laughing. She laughs, too, dropping her handful of salt; it scatters all around them as Dipper lifts her up and spins her around. “You were awesome, Mabes!”

She laughs. “Supernatural ball-busters extraordinaire! Pines!” He joins in her chant. “Pines! Pines! Pines!”

She’s still giggling when he sets her feet back down on the floor. “And y'know you weren’t so bad yourself, Mister Charge Upstairs and Yell at Ghosts.” Her hands are on his shoulders, her face close to his. She blinks, staring up at him – she’s tall but so is he, and he’s got a good several inches on her. Until she’s up close like this, she always forgets just how long his eyelashes are. Almost forgets the tiny gold flecks around his pupils. They’re both breathing a little hard. Mabel giggles again. “Um, yeah. Really good job, brobro.”

Dipper’s cheeks are a little pink. Probably from the exertion. He lets go of Mabel’s waist and adjusts his cap on his head. “Not too shabby for either of us.” He grins. “Come on. We should go call Mr. Housman. And probably apologize for the salt all over his carpet.”

They put out the burning cedar and blow out the candle and carry it all carefully back out to the Warrior. Mabel looks up at the second-floor window, but nothing is there, and no creepy feelings tingle down her spine. They really did do it. And they came out no worse for the wear, without a bunch of thoughts clanging into each other. Nice, clean solutions. She likes it. And she smiles and helps Dipper clean everything up, and then they bring the Warrior back to life and pull away from the now-unhaunted house.

 

—

 

_**Driving for many hours through mountains.** _

Dipper is having the nightmare again. _The_ nightmare. He’s had more than he can count over the years, and he has a handful of reoccurring ones. Some of them he can never remember, and he knows those are technically the worst ones. But of the ones he can recall after waking, this one is always the worst.

_EENIE._

He’s twelve again, and Mabel is with him, and they’re clenched in a giant black fist. Everything is red and a giant eye is glaring down at them and at first he’s too furious to be scared. He pummels an enormous thumb with his too-weak fists.

_MEENIE._

He knows what’s going to happen because it’s happened so many times before, here in his dreams, his nightmares. He reaches for Mabel’s hand, but even though they’re right next to each other, he can’t quite reach her. He can never quite reach her. Fear starts to spike in, breaking up his anger.

_MINEY._

Mabel is struggling, trying to get free. Her eyes are wide and damp, terrified. Dipper feels his chest heave and his stomach turn, and he fights as hard as he can because he knows he knows he knows what comes next, but he can’t break free. He can never break free.

Bill blinks.

_YOU._

His fingers snap, and Mabel dies.

It always happens a different way. Sometimes she bursts into flames, tries to scream but can’t. Sometimes her flesh bubbles and melts off her bones. Sometimes she’s just wracked with unimaginable pain, shrieking and howling until it kills her. Once, only once, she just slumped over, gone in an instant. That time should have been easier. It wasn’t.

This time it’s like Bill peels her like a banana. Her skin comes off in long, wide strips while her small body trembles. Dipper tries to scream, but like always, he can’t make a sound louder than a whisper. For some reason, the dream, the nightmare, won’t let him cry out. So he rasps out a hoarse whisper, begging, pleading, shaking as Mabel dies slowly and painfully right next to him.

And then he wakes up. He’s lying on his side, breathing hard, drenched in cold sweat, and for a second he isn’t sure where he is. Then he gains his bearings. He’s sleeping in his spot on the Warrior’s couch, his blanket kicked off onto the floor. And Mabel is—

Dipper jerks upright, swings down his legs and lands hard on the floor. He stumbles the two steps over to the loft above the cab. His hands reach out in the dark and find a soft mass — Mabel, sleeping under her pile of blankets. His hands are shaking.

Mabel makes a soft noise and turns over. Dipper makes a small, pained sound and touches her shoulders. He knows his fingers are pressing too hard, but he can’t help it. Mabel jerks fully awake with a small gasp, then pushes herself up when she sees Dipper in the faint light from the window that just barely saves the Warrior from total darkness. “Dipper?” Her voice is still thick with sleep.

“You’re alive,” he says, and his voice sounds broken. It feels broken. His hands find her face, fingers trailing over her cheekbones and jaw, thumbs brushing the fullness of her cheeks, her lips. “You’re here.” He moves his hands to her arms, her hands, any part of her he can touch and press his fingers against and know she’s here, she’s here, she’s alive, she’s alive.

“Hey. Hey, it’s okay.” Mabel shifts closer to him. “You had the nightmare again?”

His throat is thick now, and he can only nod. His hands are trembling as he holds her face and pulls it to him, kissing her forehead. His breath rushes shaky against her skin. He kisses her nose, her eyelids, her lips. His hands flutter down and grasp hold of hers again, lift them, and he holds them against his mouth, trying to breathe in deeply through his nose.

“Shhh.” Mabel leans her forehead against his, lets him keep holding her hands to his lips. “You’re all right. You’re safe. I’m safe. We’re both alive and Bill is gone. Feel me here. Right here. We’re both okay.” Dipper nods. Mabel lifts her face and kisses his cheek. “Stay with me?” He nods again.

Mabel scoots back, making room for him up on the loft. Dipper climbs in, shaking less now. She lies down and lets him curl around her back. He likes to spoon behind her when this happens, to feel her in his arms so he knows she’s there and safe and whole. They tuck against each other under Mabel’s blankets. She takes his hand and brings it to rest against her ribs, where he can feel her heart beating steady and calm. It grounds him — she grounds him — and slowly, his breathing eases down to match hers. Slowly, they both fall back asleep.

When he wakes up again, it’s to the smell of coffee. He rolls over, rubbing his eyes. Mabel is over in the kitchen area, still in her nightshirt, making pour-overs of coffee for them both. “Good morning,” she says, gently.

Dipper leaves the side of his face smooshed against a pillow. “Morning.”

“I thought I’d drive today. Let you chill in the passenger seat. You down to be co-pilot?”

“Yeah. That sounds okay.”

He brushes his teeth and pees and drinks the coffee she made. He doesn’t have much stomach for breakfast, but he manages a piece of toast so the coffee doesn’t hit him too fast and give him the jitters. After Mabel finishes her cereal and cleans up, they head out for the day.

They’re driving through the Rocky Mountains down towards Colorado. Dipper sits in the passenger seat, leaning his head against the window. Mabel has one of her mix CDs in, but it’s mostly soul stuff and the volume isn’t too high. They drive all morning, only stopping once so Mabel can run to the back and pee out all her morning coffee. They mostly stay quiet, except when Dipper reaches over to touch Mabel’s knee and say, “Thanks.”

“No problem, Dippingsauce.”

He sleeps off and on. Thankfully, he does not dream. When Mabel wakes him for lunch, the sun feels too bright. They step out of the cab into a parking lot, and it seems like the air should be hotter, but maybe being up in the mountains is keeping it cooler. Mabel found a fast food joint. It’s nothing special, but it gets a solid dose of protein in his stomach and some satisfying salt and grease. He doesn’t nap in the afternoon.

By this point in their lives, they don’t usually talk about the incidents — his many ones, her occasional ones — after they’ve passed. It’s the same stuff over and over. The same terrors, the same flashbacks, the same anxieties, the same crushing depressions. They know where it comes from, they know how to deal with it. They help each other get through it. And then when it’s over, they let it go.

So when Dipper finally starts talking around three o'clock, it’s not about his nightmare, or last night. It’s about how they’ve listened to this CD through four times, and yeah Billy Ocean is great, but Dipper’s about ready to throw the thing out the window. Mabel laughs, and Dipper flips through her CD case until he finds another one and changes them out. Then he starts teasing her about all the iron-on patches on her CD case. (Secretly he loves them. There’s a sprinkle donut, a California patch with poppies, one that says Paranormal Investigator with a cartoon ghost, several rainbow and cat-themed ones, a banana, a star-shaped one with three thick stripes of pink, purple, and blue, and a soft pretzel dripping with cheese sauce, just to name about half. She has a lot of snack-themed patches.)

When he’s done leaning on the window listlessly, they roll the windows down and turn up the music a little. Dipper still feels out of sorts from last night; it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t just go away entirely. But he feels so much better as Mabel sings along to the CD, as the sky seems bluer and bluer, as the wind coming through the window feels like it’s breaking up all the crap in his mind and clearing it up, cleaning him up.

Dipper looks over at Mabel, and he feels his heart thrumming with gratitude and love. He skips to the next song on the CD because he knows the next one is her favorite. And the smile she gives him in response is worth absolutely everything.

 

—

 

_**The photograph.** _

Economy of space is a big deal in the Warrior. It’s probably a good thing Mabel had to sell a bunch of her stuff to afford this anyway – she wouldn’t have been able to bring it all along if she’d kept it. But there are certain things she won’t leave behind, and she’s forced the space to accommodate it.

Blank wall space is almost nonexistent. Every possible place a cabinet or drawer can exist features a cabinet or drawer. The RV-makers knew how to maximize storage in such a small space. But there’s a patch of simple wall behind Dipper’s seat at the table, between the seat and the mini-fridge. And that’s where Mabel put her corkboard.

It’s a small one, but she’s jammed it full of photos, tickets from memorable past concerts, photobooth strips, and a couple especially sentimental greeting cards. But mostly photos. With their friends, their family, each other.

They’re having lunch (Mexican takeout that they fetched while out on a walk), and Mabel is staring at her corkboard. There’s the picture of her and Pacifica when they took a trip to Nye Beach last summer; Pacifica is a little sunburnt and laughing while Mabel licks a popsicle in an exaggeratedly suggestive way. There’s the one of Candy and Grenda that they sent her one winter when she missed them so much she thought she’d burst; they’re fifteen and wearing Santa hats and making a heart out of two candy canes. There’s Dipper with his old roommate Chirag when they went camping, the summer before Dipper moved further up north to his secluded little apartment. There’s the one Dipper took of Wendy and her boyfriend Matt, both of them laughing and flipping off the camera. There’s the photobooth strip she dragged Dipper into; he looks reluctant in the first one, but by the last one he’s being just as ridiculous as she is.

Her gaze finally settles on one of her favorites. It’s several years old, from the summer before Mabel started college. It’s in Gravity Falls, on the porch of the Shack. Her, Dipper, Stan, and Ford. She has a purple glitter butterfly sticker on her cheek. Ford has a silver glitter kitten sticker on his forehead. Dipper is laughing at him, Stan is rolling his eyes, and Ford and Mabel are grinning at each other.

She really loves that photo.

“Earth to Mabel.”

She blinks. “Oh. Sorry, Dip. Just zoned out looking at the photos.”

Dipper glances over his shoulder at the corkboard. “You’ve got a good setup there.”

“I was mostly looking at the one of us with our grunkles. You know, the sticker one.” Mabel smiles, resting her chin in her hand. “What a bunch of weirdos.”

“I hope you’re including yourself in that statement.”

“Absolutely.”

Dipper finishes another mouthful of barbacoa and rice, then says, “Remember what you said the other day? About our family being weird?”

Mabel looks at him. Then she remembers. “Yeah. I mean, we’re definitely weirdos in the usual sense. Bunch of crazy folk. But, yeah, also in the spooky sense.” She smiles wryly. “We Pines have a habit of getting caught up in all kinds of supernatural hoo-ha, don’t we?”

“A legacy we’ve inherited.” Dipper stares at his food. “Y'know, I’ve been thinking. About– about how that weather witch said something was up with me. And how that whole thing went down. About what you said when you read my cards. About— a lot of stuff. And…” He sighs and looks up at her. “I mean, we’re pretty messed up, Mabel. I know I’m pretty messed up.”

“Shush. You’re good.” There’s a sadness in his eyes that twinges her chest.

“C'mon, Mabes, you know I’m messed up. We both are, more or less. And Great-Uncle Ford, and Stan…” He rolls his eyes, smiling a little. “Well, Stan is weirdly resilient to all of this.”

Mabel nods. “It’s his stubborn and cantankerous nature, m'boy.”

“Anyway…” Dipper sets down his fork. “It’s… At this point it’s basically a family legacy, y'know? Getting entrenched in supernatural bullshit and ending up having to deal with the after-effects. It’s what we do. And I guess what I’m trying to say is even when it’s not pretty, it’s still my life. Our life. And I don’t think it’s a bad legacy to have. So I’m gonna try not to let it get to me. We’re weird. Sometimes it sucks. But it’s who we are, and really, I think there’s a lot about it to be proud of. Y'know?”

She smiles. “Yeah, I know.” She tilts her head, resting her chin on her hands. “I’m really proud of you, Dipper.”

He lets out a soft chuckle. “Yeah, well, that goes both ways.”

“Good.” She points her fork at him. “So finish up your burrito bowl, mister. We’re like ten miles away from a dinosaur-themed national park. The dinos, they will not wait for us.”

“Mabes, they’re fossilized bones still stuck in the rock faces. They’ve been waiting millions of years.”

“Yeah, but the park’s only open ‘til six.”

“Good point.”

He digs back into his lunch, and Mabel watches him for a little while before letting her gaze shift back to the corkboard. Her grunkles’ scruffy old faces make her smile, a soft, warm feeling settling in her chest.

Dipper’s right. There’s a lot of weirdness in their family. Some of it’s good, some of it’s not. Some of it messes up their heads and makes them wake up crying in the middle of the night. Some of it makes them braver and stronger and better. And all of it draws them closer together. If it weren’t for all the weirdness, she knows she and Dipper wouldn’t be as close as they are. They’d still, of course, be close – nothing could ever make them not twins. But the things they’ve been through, the things they know and feel, have shaped them into something else. Something tighter and fiercer and more intimate. And she’s glad.

Mabel smiles at the corkboard, at all the pictures of the people she loves, and at the guy sitting in front of the corkboard, whom she also loves.

She’s glad.


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happens when two people with a ton of supernatural-related baggage go looking for the supernatural.
> 
> Two parts shenanigans, five parts emotional issues, three parts spookiness & horror, two parts hurt/comfort, four parts heartwarming love, intimacy, support. And, of course, pinecest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably my favorite chapter of Be Okay (except maybe the last one). It also features my favorite side-character that I made up for the story (in the first section). Also it gets kinda scary (depending on your scariness threshold).
> 
> ALSO: my apologies for not updating this fic in forever. It's been completed on Tumblr for ages but I kept forgetting to finish uploading it here, like an ass. It's all going up now, so if you've got subscriptions on this fic, hoo boy you're gonna have four chapters of delight (and angst - and delight!) coming your way. Enjoy, and my apologies again.

_**In search of sea life.** _

New Mexico is relentlessly sunny. Not as hot as Dipper expects it to be, but the sun makes him tug the brim of his cap a little lower to shade his eyes. Mabel doesn’t seem to mind. Of course, the sun never seems to bother her. She just pulls off her sweatshirt and ties it around her waist, then practically skips down the road in her tank top.

Dipper smiles, trailing behind her. A warm happiness settles in his chest. Bringing Mabel to the outdoor flea market had been something of an impulse decision and also a surprise for her, and he’s glad he did it. She’s all lit up, sparkling and smiling, flitting from table to table to examine clothes and candlesticks and hand-made dolls. Her joy is infectious; Dipper’s mood is buoyant, too.

He lets Mabel wander a few sections away and pauses at a table of electronics. He considers a couple small video cameras while the seller is engaged with someone else, but eventually he leaves it and moves on to a table stacked with books.

“You made a good choice,” says the girl sitting behind the book table. “Half the stuff he’s selling is hot. You know.” She leans in, half-whispering, her long reddish hair falling in her eyes. “Stolen.”

Dipper raises his eyebrows. “Yeesh. Good to know. Thanks.” He finds a copy of a Ray Bradbury book he hasn’t read yet and flips through the pages, checking for any major stains or someone else’s notes written in the margins.

“Is that a good one?”

He looks up. The girl is pointing to the book he’s holding. “Um, I’m not sure. I haven’t read it before.”

“Oh. Neither have I.” She shrugs but keeps staring at him. Her gaze is weirdly intense, and she doesn’t blink. “I haven’t read most of these. But people like to look through them, and it’s nice to make people happy.”

“O… kay…” Dipper sets down the book. “Uh, anyway, thanks. Have a good one.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, did I make you uncomfortable?” The girl fidgets with the shoulder of her blue-and-white prairie dress, and Dipper sighs and stays by the table. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. It’s just nice to talk to someone like me.”

He lifts one eyebrow and glances around for Mabel. “Um, like you?”

She stares at him. “You know. Of the other.”

This girl is seriously weirding him out. But there’s something in her gaze that feels familiar. He’s seen other people look at him this way. The woo-woo lady who sold him his tea and gave Mabel the job in her shop. The weather witch they met in Montana.

Dipper puts a hand on the table and leans closer. He can see coppery freckles scattered over her tan skin. “Can you be more specific in what you mean by ‘other’?”

The girl purses her lips and taps a finger on the table-top. “Hm. Oh, what would you call it? The supernatural, I think?”

He sighs. Why, why, why is he constantly running into people who can apparently sense this about him? Is it a smell? Does he have some kind of aura? Or is it just the kind of thing you can recognize in someone else’s eyes when you’ve been there, too? He lowers his voice. “And you said you think I’m of the supernatural?”

“Well not exactly. You’re just marked by the other. Very, very heavily marked. You’re not exactly of it like I am.”

There are two aspects to that statement that are bugging him. He goes with the less personal one first. “You– you are actually supernatural yourself?”

“That’s what you would call it, I think.” The girl blinks her big eyes at him. “Before I was forced into this body, I was of the sea.”

Dipper stares at her, pretty sure his expression is probably comically flabbergasted. “You’re a mermaid?”

“Well I used to be!”

Tears are welling up in her eyes and oh shit, oh shit, Dipper did not sign up for this. But then an arm loops through his and Mabel’s cheery voice rings out, “Hey Dips, nerding it up at the book stand?” Then she freezes, seeing the girl behind the table. “Oh no. Oh no, Dipper, you didn’t make her cry, did you?”

He whips his head around. “Mabes, she’s a _mermaid_.”

“Used to be!” The girl is sniffling and digging in a bag on the floor before pulling out a wad of tissues and pressing them to her eyes. “Oh no, I’m so sorry.”

“No no no, we’re sorry.” Mabel glances at Dipper, at the former mermaid, around the flea market. “Hey, hey, it’s all good! Were you a, um, a carniverous mermaid or an herbivore?”

“I ate fish,” the girl hiccups from behind her tissues.

“Well there’s a fish and chips stand over in the food area. Whaddaya say we buy you some lunch, make up for my brother making you cry?”

“Mabel, I didn’t–”

The girl peeks out from the clump of crumpled tissues in her hands. “That would be so nice of you. Thank you. Give me a moment to close up.”

She starts gathering some things behind the table. Dipper leans in closer to Mabel and whispers. “She said I was marked, Mabel. Marked. Like I walked up to her table and she was just like, Oh hey, you’re ‘heavily marked’ by the supernatural. What does that even mean?”

“Maybe you should ask her instead of whispering.” Mabel boops his nose with her finger. “This is a real live mermaid! Don’t ruin this for me.” She turns to the girl. “Are you ready? By the way, I’m Mabel, and this cranky scab over here is Dipper. What’s your name?”

The girl stands up, her hair still in her face. “I call myself Lorna now. My real name doesn’t work with human speech.”

“Well, Lorna is still very pretty. C'mon.”

They go to the concessions area and get plates of fish and chips and bottles of water, then sit at a table off in the corner, a little ways away from other patrons. Before they even start eating, Lorna downs her entire bottle of water in one go, then looks at them sheepishly as she wipes her mouth. “Sorry,” she says. “I dry out so fast. I’m not really completely human, still.”

“No worries,” Mabel says. “Enjoy your fish.”

Dipper looks back and forth between them as they all eat. Mabel doesn’t seem bothered by what he told her. Maybe she doesn’t think it’s a big deal. Or maybe she’s so excited to meet a mermaid that it’s not really registering. Either way, he feels all tense and itchy about it as Mabel and Lorna chatter, swapping stories about supernatural encounters. Lorna, it seems, was kidnapped from her home in the ocean and hauled inland, studied by someone she refers to as a sorcerer but god knows what that means specifically, then turned more-or-less human and set loose here in New Mexico. It’s a cruel thing. He feels sorry for her – for being kidnapped, for being transformed into something she’s not, for not being able to go home, all of it. But the itchy tension doesn’t go away just because he feels bad for her.

He waits for a lull in the conversation because he’s not a total asshole. When there’s a space between topics, he clears his throat and says, “So, uh, Lorna. What exactly did you mean when you said I was 'marked’?” He points at Mabel. “Is she, too?”

Lorna shakes her head. “No. I couldn’t tell anything about her when she walked up. I like her now, though.”

Mabel smiles, but Dipper keeps pressing. “So why me?”

Lorna tilts her head, staring at him with those big, pale eyes. “Because the Eye was in your mind,” she says, plainly.

A clutching feeling spasms in Dipper’s chest. He realizes he’s grabbed Mabel’s arm. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her looking at him, her expression finally concerned. “The– Eye?”

“Mm hm.” Lorna nods. “You were his vessel. Anyone who’s been a vessel of the Eye carries his signature. And anyone who’s of the other can read it on you.”

His heart is going to skitter out of his chest and run screaming down the street. Mabel’s taken his hand in hers; he clenches it. “Puppet,” he says.

“I’m sorry?”

“Not vessel. I was his puppet.”

It feels like everything is falling apart in his mind. He lowers his head closer to the table and presses the fingers of his free hand into the wood, feeling the grain of it. He forces his lungs to breathe slowly and evenly. He hears Mabel talking. “What do you mean, people of the other can tell? Like anyone who knows about supernatural stuff?”

“No, no that. Only those of the other. Um, those who are supernatural. Like me. Or any– I guess you might call them monsters, or creatures. Demons and spirits, too. Anyone like me, like that, can tell when the Eye has been in someone’s mind. I’m– I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset him, or you. But you know what I mean when I talk about the Eye?”

“We knew him by a different name,” Dipper manages, sitting up slowly. “But yeah. Yeah, we know.”

Mabel’s gripping his hand so hard it hurts. “What do we do about it?”

Lorna looks confused. “There’s nothing to do. Being marked doesn’t harm you. It just is. He’s been marked ever since his mind was taken. If you haven’t had to do anything before, you won’t have to do anything now.”

“I wouldn’t say I haven’t had to do anything,” Dipper says. The wave of panic is receding – it’s there, rushing under his skin and behind his eyes, but he’s breathing steadily enough and grounded enough by Mabel squeezing his hand that he’s pretty sure he can ride it out without getting overwhelmed by it. “But– so anyone like you, anyone who’s a supernatural being, can tell just by looking at me that Bi– the Eye possessed me?”

Lorna nods. “More by sensing it than by seeing it, but yes. I’m so sorry. I really am. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s okay.” Dipper lets out a rough sigh. “It’s not your fault. I think… I think I’m glad I know this.”

Nobody says anything for a while. The sun is hot on the back of Dipper’s neck; he’s sweating, a little from the sun and a little from panic, and he can smell his sunscreen and deodorant. Then Lorna says, “I think I understand, in a way.” Dipper looks up at her. “Not exactly. I’ve never– thank goodness I’ve never had dealings with the Eye. But in other ways.” She smiles, and it’s a really sad kind of smile. “I’m isolated by my past, too. It’s a heavy burden, the other. Sorry, the supernatural. When you live here in the human world, being part of the supernatural makes things a lot harder. And lonelier. And both of you are part of it, even if you’re not born from it like I am.”

Mabel reaches her free hand across the table. “Thank you. That’s sweet of you to say.”

Lorna laughs a little. It’s a tinkly kind of sound. She touches Mabel’s hand. “It’s important to find strength where you can.” The she blinks and pulls back her hand. “Oh no. Oh dear.” She’s welling up again and scrambles in her bag for her tissues. “I’m so sorry!”

A hint of a smile tugs at Dipper’s mouth as Lorna presses her face into her tissues again. “Come on. It’s okay, don’t cry. You’ll dry yourself all out again.”

She looks up, damp-eyed, and smiles back. “Oh I will, won’t I? You’re so kind. You’re both so kind. Thank you for being kind to me.” She blows her nose, then folds up her tissue. “It means so much to me. It can be so lonely, being of the other in a world full of humans. And even though we aren’t the same, I know you can understand more than most humans can.” She sniffles, but she’s still smiling. “You can have the book.”

Dipper blinks. “Sorry?”

“The book you were looking at over at my table. You can have it. No charge.”

“Thank you.” Dipper scratches the back of his head. He’s still jittery and shaky, but his mind is calming down – his body just has to catch up. “That’s really nice.”

“We have to give you something, too,” Mabel says. “Something you can have to remember you’re not so alone. Oh, shoot, jeez, hang on.” She’s rummaging in her bag. “Oh, here!” She turns, pulling out a tube of lip balm. “It’s peppermint. And when the lip balm all runs out, you can wash out the tube and write your secret thoughts and wishes on little scraps of paper and fold them up really tiny and put them in the tube to keep them safe. Hang on.” She pulls a Sharpie out of her bag and doodles something on the bottom of the tube, then holds it out. “There. For you.”

Lorna’s eyes shine as she takes the lip balm. “That’s perfect. Oh, that’s perfect! Thank you so much!”

“Also, do you have a cell phone? 'Cause like, girl, we should absolutely exchange numbers.”

 

–

 

_**A blue tin kettle.** _

Mabel and Dipper decide, for their birthday, to stop off for a full week in an actual campsite in Oklahoma. They’ve been avoiding campsites for the most part, finding out-of-the-way places to park the Warrior overnight and relying on Mabel’s wards to keep them safe and make sure any local law enforcement sort of don’t really notice them. But the couple times they have actually stopped in a campsite have been nice, and a whole week of it leading up to their birthday sounds like a good break.

They find a nice state park about a hundred miles west of Oklahoma City. It’s only twenty-five bucks a night, and they agree that’s a fair price for their birthday present to themselves. Their spot is right near the lake, nestled between some trees. The actual beach part of the lake is a bit of a walk, but it’s nice. They relax, they swim in the lake, they build campfires and cook out on them, and they plan Skype dates with important folks for their actual birthday before they roll back out on the road.

It’s their fourth day camping, and Mabel is sitting in front of the RV, looking out over the lake. It’s still a hot summer day, but the breeze from the lake is cool, so she’s wearing one of Dipper’s plaid shirts over her sundress. She has a cold can of Pitt in one hand, her cherry-red sunglasses on, her hair in a ponytail, and her feet up on a stump.

Everything is beautiful and relaxing and chill. Except her mind.

She can’t help it. She’s been trying so, so hard to just let go of everything and enjoy their birthday week. And on the outside, she’s been doing pretty good. She makes s'mores with Dipper and laughs when gooey marshmallow smears across her cheek. She splashes him in the lake and does her trademark Mabel Beach Dance. She makes them coffee every morning and plays dance music to help them wake up (and a little bit to annoy Dipper). And last night when they sat up until two o'clock on the couch in the Warrior, looking through one of her scrapbooks, she smiled when Dipper leaned his head against hers, then turned his face closer to her, his nose brushing her cheek, and let her eyes flutter closed when he sort of rested his lips against her cheek but didn’t quite kiss it.

All good on the outside. But inside, she’s filling up more and more with guilt.

The guilt sneaked up on her. When they were driving out of New Mexico, it was only a twinge in her chest from how Dipper had looked when Lorna told him he was marked by Bill. It hurt to see him like that. When they were passing through Texas, it grew into a strange, heavy feeling in her stomach that she couldn’t quite name, but she knew it had to do with how Bill had tricked her, too, even if he’d never gone into her mindscape. And by the time they crossed into Oklahoma and found the state park and settled in at their campsite, it was a full-blown, writhing mass of guilt and doubt.

Mabel sips her Pitt Cola. She’s not sure which is worse, the guilt or the doubt. Guilt that people keep pointing out how Dipper’s messed up when she’s messed up, too. Bill screwed with her, too. She came out damaged, too. But Dipper’s the one getting all this flack, and she can see it wearing on him. He tries not to let her see. He’s trying as hard as she is to have a good week. But last night, when he thought she was asleep, he put their old blue kettle on the stove and heated water to make himself a cup of tea. Dipper only drinks tea when it’s the woo-woo tea Witch Mama had made for him to help calm the side-effects of demon-induced trauma. Mabel always helps him when he’s feeling that way, so why hadn’t he told her, woken her, _said_ something?

But the doubt might be even worse. The doubt that creeps into her mind and curls up right next to her and whispers _He would have been better off if you’d let him stay home._

She shakes her head and takes another drink. The cold and carbonation give her a little jolt to pull away from the lingering thoughts. She can’t give into it. Not now. They’re in this, for better or worse.

God, she just hopes it isn’t for worse.

Dipper comes out of the Warrior, yawning. “Jeez. Did I really nap for two hours?”

“Sure did, broseph. I’m not surprised. You ate almost three sloppy joes for lunch.”

“Yeah, 'cause I was starving. Hiking the trails all morning works up the appetite, you know.” He sits down in the grass next to her chair. She offers him her can of Pitt, and he takes it, has a sip, and hands it back. “Thanks, Mabes.” They sit in silence for a while, listening to the birds and the soft lapping of the lake. Dipper scoots a little closer and leans his head against her thigh.

Mabel moves her soda to her other hand and reaches down to run her fingers through his hair, fluffing it and gently rubbing his scalp. He makes a soft, contented noise, and his shoulders relax more. Dipper’s been kind of extra touchy lately– which he confirms when he lifts a hand and touches the back of her knee.

A laugh escapes her, and she jerks her leg, inadvertently pushing his head away when her thigh moves. “Sorry, Dip, that tickles.”

He looks up at her, sheepish. “Ah, yeah, sorry. I just– eh, nevermind.” He leans his head down again, and she goes back to playing with his hair.

Now that he can’t see her face, she lets herself frown. Is it because he’s so uncomfortable in general? So worried and stressed? And is he so mixed up because he’s doing too much, pushing too close to the woo-woo stuff, going too far into the world that’s done so much to him? And if he is going too far, isn’t it all her fault?

She bites her lip and closes her eyes. She tries to focus on the breeze skimming over her bare legs. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s going to be fine.

The guilt/doubt feeling doesn’t lift over the last few days of their vacation, but it doesn’t get worse, either. Status quo successfully maintained. On the night of the 30th, they get cupcakes and bring them back to the campsite. At midnight, when the date rolls over to the 31st, they poke candles into two of the cupcakes, light the candles, and grin at each other, making secret wishes. (Mabel wishes wishes wishes for Dipper to be okay.) Then they blow them out and eat the cupcakes.

On their birthday, they have their Skype calls and phone calls, and it’s so good to hear their parents’ voices, their friends, their grunkles’. Mabel wants to ask Ford about the being-marked-by-Bill things – if he knows about it, or if not, then just to tell him about it since he and probably Stan must be marked, too – but Dipper doesn’t bring it up, and Mabel feels like if he doesn’t then she shouldn’t, so it goes unsaid.

They’re twenty-three now, and truth be told it doesn’t feel that different from twenty-two, except that their daily life is really different now. When they’re winding down at the end of the night, Mabel is sitting in her loft with her legs hanging down over the edge while Dipper packs things away and gets the Warrior ready for them to get back on the road tomorrow. Then he stops and looks at her. She tilts her head. “'Sup, Dippingsauce?”

He comes over to her and stands in front of her. He’s between her knees, and after a second he puts his hands on her knees, lightly. “Hey,” he says quietly.

“Hey.”

“I’m– I’m really glad I’m here with you, Mabel,” he says. He looks at her and his eyes look so full. She can see the little golden-yellow flecks in them. The way he looks at her, all warm eyes and soft little half-smile, makes her heart melt.

“Me too.” She puts her hands over his. “Nobody else I’d rather be with.”

His eyes crinkle up from smiling. He glances down, then looks back up at her and says, “Can I– um, can…” He swallows and does the tiny facial tic, a tightening of jaw muscles, that he does whenever he’s holding back something. “Can I sleep in the loft tonight?” he finally says. “You know, snuggle it up?”

She nods. “Sure. Anytime you want, brobro.” He nods, too, then kisses her forehead and withdraws to finish packing up for the night.

They cuddle up in the loft under the soft glow of Mabel’s string of lights, like they’d cuddle on the couch watching movies. They talk and giggle and snark at each other until sleepiness settles in, and Mabel, with her head resting on his shoulder and his arm slung over her waist, sleeps as calm and easy as she ever has.

Morning comes bright and clear. They don’t waste much time – coffee and breakfast, double-checking that everything’s ready, then Dipper climbs down into the cab. Mabel makes one last sweep to ensure everything’s fine.

She’s in the teensy tiny closet of a bathroom, making sure the handsoap and shampoos and stuff are tucked down in their cabinet, when she looks out the little window over the sink. And then it feels like her heart just might stop, and her whole body tingles with dread and deja vu.

Something is standing out there. It’s further around the curve of the lake, away from the RVs, obscured just enough by tall grasses and trees that she can’t see it clearly. But she sees it. Its arms look too long for its body, and it’s light-colored, and it’s facing the Warrior.

She slams out of the bathroom and through the RV, climbing down into the cab and buckling her seatbelt. “Let’s roll,” she says, her voice too tense.

Dipper looks at her, brow furrowed. “You okay, Mabes?”

“Yeah, I’m good.” She takes a deep breath. “Just– y'know, let’s hurry on out to beat the traffic.”

He laughs a little. “Rush hour’s already over, you know. But don’t worry, I’m going.” He turns the key in the ignition, and they pull out of the campsite.

They drive down the road heading out of the park, and Mabel keeps checking the side-view mirror, but she doesn’t see it again. They left it behind. And once they pull onto the highway, her pulse calms down and she finds one of her mix CDs to put in and play.

She glances at Dipper and makes a conscious effort not to bite her lip. Part of her wants to tell him, knows she probably should tell him. But part of her just wants to see him keep being happy. He seems so genuinely happy right now. And the thought of his stressed face, tight shoulders, worried brow is enough to turn her stomach.

So she leans back in her seat, watches the plains go by, and doesn’t say a thing.

 

–

 

_**Wanderer on a scorched path.** _

They pull off at a rest stop just outside Wichita. It’s midday and hot, and Mabel’s been fidgety all morning. Maybe stretching her legs will help.

Dipper fills up the Warrior’s tank while Mabel goes into the building. For bladder relief and possibly snacks, she tells him as she leaves.

It was a good week camping. Not perfect. Dipper hasn’t been able to really shake off what the ex-mermaid told him. Thankfully he hasn’t been having nightmares, but the knowledge of it, know he’s been marked – branded – changed in some way by Bill’s presence in his mind… The thought of it is always there. It didn’t stop him from having fun with Mabel, but it dragged things down. He made that gross tea twice, though he didn’t wake Mabel to talk about it either time. He didn’t want to…

He sighs, running a hand over his eyes. Come on, man. Chill out. He feels like he’s walking the line of codepency and it bugs him. Almost every day, he wants to be close to Mabel, head on her shoulder, or hers on his shoulder, holding her hand, something, anything. Probably because of what Lorna told him. Whenever shit gets bad – whenever his mind flies off into endless loops of horrible things – whenever he’s too lost to ground himself, it’s Mabel who grounds him. With her presence. With her smile. With her touch.

His face gets warmer. He tries to convince himself it’s just the sun, but he’s too self-aware for that. Seriously, dude, get. It. Together.

The tank is full and Dipper’s about to head in to use the bathroom himself. He turns and sees Mabel almost running towards him. “Jesus, what’s–”

“Get in.” Mabel grabs his arm and shoves him towards the Warrior. “We need to go. Now.”

The urgency in her voice scares him a little. “What happened?”

“Seriously, _get in._ ” When he doesn’t move immediately, she makes a weird frustrated noise and hurries around the front of the cab and climbs into the driver’s seat. “Get in the RV, Dipper!”

He has no clue what’s going on, but she’s being deadly serious, and Dipper trusts her enough not to keep questioning. So he gets in on the passenger side and is buckling his seatbelt as Mabel turns on the engine. “What is going on?” he asks again, turning to look outside.

And he sees it.

The sideview mirror shows it. It’s standing on the sun-baked earth a little ways off from the parking lot. It’s a humanoid shape, but it’s kind of hunched and its arms look too long for its body and its skin is almost the same color as the pale dirt and is kind of wrinkled. He can’t make out the face, but he can see it crouch.

“Holy fuck!”

Mabel pulls the Warrior out of the rest stop and practically careens back up the on-ramp to the highway. Dipper’s heart is hammering against his ribs as the thing leaps after them, chasing in a galloping stride. It jumps the guardrail and tries to follow them up to the highway, but they get too fast, and eventually the thing recedes into the distance, left behind.

Dipper realizes one hand is gripping the armrest so hard his knuckles hurt. He pries his fingers loose and looks over at Mabel. She looks terrified and angry and focused, staring straight ahead at the road.

He can’t stop shivering. It’s weird and awful, this sort of primal fear that struck straight down in his gut. He’s seen a lot of weird, freaky shit in his life. A lot of it doesn’t phase him anymore. Only the really bad stuff gives him this kind of instant reaction.

“What the hell was that?” he asks.

It’s a rhetorical question. Of course neither of them know what it is. But as soon as he asks it, Mabel’s face scrunches up and she starts to cry.

“Mabel– Mabel, what’s wrong? Seriously, you’re kind of scaring me here.”

She sniffs, scrubs her eyes with one hand. “I think it’s following us,” she says.

“Well yeah, I saw that too. I’m pretty sure we outran it though.”

She shakes her head. “Not just… no. I mean really following us.” There’s a long pause. Dipper stares at her. A weird feeling is starting up in his gut. He doesn’t like it. And it makes him pretty sure he’s not going to like whatever she says next. “I’ve– I’ve seen that thing before.”

“Okay… Where?”

Mabel sighs. “The first time was in Gravity Falls.”

“The first time?” Dipper twists in his seat. “You’ve seen that thing more than once?”

She nods. “I saw it in Gravity Falls the night before we left. Out in the trees, watching the Shack. And then I saw it again right when we were leaving the campsite in Oklahoma. That’s why I wanted to get out of there so fast.”

Seriously. Seriously? That thing is some of the freakiest shit he’s seen in years, and Mabel’s seen it twice and didn’t mention anything? “Why didn’t you say anything?” He hears the bite in his voice, but he can’t help it.

“I didn’t think it was a big deal the first time!” she says. Her hands are gripping the wheel too hard. “There’s so much weird stuff in Gravity Falls. I had no way of knowing it was gonna follow us. I’m not an idiot, I told Soos I saw something, but like, it just didn’t seem like a huge deal then! And then it was gone and I didn’t think about it. And when I saw it at the campsite I just– I don’t know, Dipper, I panicked. I didn’t want to upset you, so I just–”

“Didn’t want to upset me?” His voice is pitching up and getting louder, but he can’t stop it. Or won’t. Or both. “Like how you’re totally not upsetting me right now?” She flinches at his harsh sarcasm, but he keeps going. “And what if it’s not just one thing? We’re 1500 miles from Gravity Falls. How could one thing follow us so far? What if this a whole species of monster that for some reason keeps being attracted to us? Did you see those giant fucking claws on its hands? _Why would you not tell me this?_ “

“Because I don’t want to make things worse!”

“How can it possibly make it better to–”

“ _Please stop yelling._ ”

Dipper blanches. Mabel’s shoulder are hunched up around her ears; she’s bent over the steering wheel, eyes glued to the road, but her face is flushed and her knuckles white. Dipper sighs and looks away, out the window, then lets his face fall into his hand. He rubs one temple with his thumb and takes a couple deep breaths, feeling cold, prickly shame trickle through his body.

“I’m sorry,” he finally says. “For yelling. But I’m still upset. Seriously, Mabel, how could keeping this from me make anything better?”

She’s wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Shit. Shit shit shit did he make her cry? She was crying at first, before he yelled, but now did he make her cry? She starts talking, her voice mostly even. “You were just so… I mean, first there was the whole thing with the weather witch that I don’t think was too good for either of us. And then what Lorna told you. And I know–” She glances sideways at him for a second, then back to the road. “I know you made your tea one night while we were camping. But you didn’t even talk to me about it. And I just…” She bites her lip. “I don’t know, Dipper, okay? It wasn’t rational, okay? But I just felt like telling you about one more weird-o effed-up thing screwing with our lives was gonna make you feel even worse. And I just–” Her voice is getting kind of high and tight, and it makes his chest hurt. “I just can’t stand seeing you like that. I can’t stand it, Dipper. It hurts too much to know you’re hurting so much.”

“Mabes–”

“How can it not?” She wipes her eyes again. “How can I not feel like my own heart’s getting stomped on when yours is? How can I not feel like I’m gonna sink when you’re sinking? You’re my brother. You’re my twin. You’re my Dipper. The whole reason we can help each other through all this garbage is because we’re– we’re– we’re _part_ of each other, which means I should have your back, which means it’s so, so shitty that I’ve gone and made things worse by dragging you out here and then keeping secrets and just–” Mabel stops and shakes her head. “I’m just scared, now. And I’m scared of this thing. And–” She cuts herself off and makes a small sound, staring straight ahead.

Dipper turns his head and sees it, too. That thing, or another of its kind, galloping across the flat plain alongside the highway. Adrenaline spikes through his system. “Keep going,” he says.

Mabel presses her foot harder on the gas. They fly past the thing just as it comes up to the road. In the sideview mirror, Dipper sees it try to follow them, but they easily leave it far behind.

He looks back over. Mabel’s clutching the steering wheel again, her eyes wide. “Just keep driving, Mabes,” he says. “Don’t– don’t worry about all this shit right now. We’ll figure it out. Right now, just keep driving.”

 

–

 

_**It had no eyes.** _

They drive for over six hours, only stopping once on the shoulder long enough for Mabel and Dipper to switch places. When Dipper pulls the Warrior back onto the road, Mabel goes back into the tiny bathroom and closes its little folding door. She’s all folded up too, in there. She sits on the floor of the shower with her knees tucked up to her nose, and she closes her eyes.

She and Dipper have faced a lot of monsters together in their time. Bravely. But this one makes both of them go into heebie-jeebie holy-terror high-alert mode, and she doesn’t know why.

Eventually she crawls out of the bathroom and joins Dipper again. They don’t talk much, and they don’t rehash their fight. They drive and drive, and at one point Mabel goes and double-checks the drawer where they keep the baseball bats, the holy water, the switchblades, her grappling hook.

They follow the highway to somewhere in Iowa and finally stop. They’ve put significant distance between themselves and the thing, or things, but they stay on alert as they pull into a campsite. A campsite seems safer, now, than parking the Warrior off somewhere isolated. At least here there are lights and people who can hear them scream, if it came to that.

Mabel’s been jittery and tired all day, the kind of tired that comes on from crying too much and being anxious for too long. And not eating enough. She spreads some peanut butter on a slice of bread and eats it numbly while Dipper pays for their campsite.

He comes back into the Warrior and looks at her in the dim light. He looks so tired, too. His shoulders are tense. “Let’s go take showers,” he says. “It’ll be good.”

Mabel thinks she should make a joke about how the campsite public showers are never good, but she can’t quite muster it. So she just nods and grabs her towel.

They shuffle together towards the camp bathrooms, their flip-flops slapping on their heels (because even though she feels gross and guilty and scared, Mabel can’t imagine putting her bare feet on a public shower floor). Dusk is falling and the lamplights are turning on. Mosquitos bite her shins and she ignores them.

Every sound makes her startle. She notices Dipper watching her out of the corner of his eye, but she can’t help it. All she can think is that the thing must have followed them, must be here, must be waiting for them or looking for them.

“Mabes,” he says. His voice is low and soft. “We’re gonna be okay. There’s no way that thing could have followed us so fast.”

But she isn’t sure he even believes himself.

Parting at the showers makes Mabel’s pulse quicken. She doesn’t want to go alone into the women’s showers while Dipper goes alone into the men’s. She flinches under the lukewarm water, feeling vulnerable, exposed, fragile. She doesn’t like it. She hates it. In the face of danger she’s always quick and adaptive and brave, even when it’s really scary. She closes her eyes under the water and shivers through a flashback of a giant red-and-black pyramid with one eye and too many teeth thundering after her and her brother. She made it through that (barely, by the grace of her great-uncle’s sacrifice). She can make it through this, too (or can she, surely their luck is going to run out someday).

She dries her hair to damp with her towel and gets back into her clothes, and she goes to meet Dipper outside.

He’s not there yet. Lingering in the shower, it seems. Mabel holds her towel and her little bag of shampoo and conditioner and soap, and she stares out into the increasingly-dim evening with watchful eyes. Movement– it’s a couple, strolling down the gravel walkway towards a circle of pop-up campers. Movement– a rabbit, bolting across the field behind the showers.

Movement– a figure with arms too long for its body.

A tiny sound escapes her, a pathetic squeak. She presses a hand back against the brick wall of the showers and silently begs begs begs Dipper to come out.

The thing starts to cross the field towards her. Why does nobody else see it. Are they really too far away to see it. Why is a towel all she has.

“Dipper.” Her voice creaks out of her throat.

The thing is halfway across the field. She can see the dark claws on its hands, the bulge of muscles in its legs, the drooping, wrinkling of its skin.

“Dipper.” Her voice is stronger this time. She can’t hear water running anymore. Is he coming? Is he coming out?

The thing is almost to her. It’s moving so fast. She can see its face, finally see its face, and oh god, it has a wide mouth and two slits for nostrils, but where its eyes should be is one indent in the middle of its face, like a tennis ball landed in a bowl of pudding. She has time to call for Dipper one more time, her voice pitching up hysterical, before the thing slams up to her.

It slams, its feet thudding down on the cement and its hands cracking into the brick wall. Mabel is pure nerve, crouched back against the rough brick with this thing looming over her, clawed hands smashed against the wall on either side of her head, and it smells like rot and dead things and it’s hard to breathe. It moves its red-rimmed mouth and says in a voice that sounds like swallowed gravel, “Not you.”

“ _Hey!_ ”

Mabel turns her head. She’s surprised, somewhere, that she’s able to turn her head. Her heart is hammering and Dipper is there, towel around his neck, and his eyes are wide and scared but his voice is steady and strong. “Get away from my sister!”

The thing makes a grinding sound in its throat and wrenches one hand free from the wall. Mabel flinches as flakes and small chunks of brick shower down on her shoulder. “This one,” the thing growls, swiveling its head towards Dipper. It lets out a snuffling breath, and Mabel smells old blood. “This one is the one I smell.”

Dipper is clutching his towel in one hand. He’s standing there in shorts and flip-flops with wet hair and despite his broad shoulders what can he possibly possibly do right now against this thing. But he says, “Get. Away.”

The thing pulls its other hand free. “You smell,” it says, “like the voice of the Eye.” And it lurches towards Dipper.

Something in Mabel uncoils, snaps free, and the fear coursing through her veins becomes useful in moving her legs. “Run!” she screams, and Dipper doesn’t hesitate. He bolts around the corner. She shoots around the other corner, her legs pumping faster than she could ever think they would, and she meets Dipper on the other side of the small building. They don’t pause to grab each other’s hands or even look at each other. They just run towards the trees.

She can hear the thing galloping after them. “Lose the shoes,” Dipper gasps as they run. Mabel lifts her feet out of them, and once they’re gone the slap-slap noise of running in them is silenced. Sticks and stones hurt her feet as they run, but they’re running more quietly now, aside from their breathing. Shoulder to shoulder, they plunge into the woods as the thing barrells after them.

Trees flash by, the ground rises and falls. The last traces of sunset are just visible, just enough to guide their feet. They break into an area of rocky ridges, and Dipper grabs Mabel’s arm and they careen down a small slope and tumble into an alcove in the rocks, a few feet below the trail they were running.

Mabel loops her arm around Dipper’s at the elbow and clutches his hand in hers. They both try to quiet their breathing. Mabel closes her eyes and thinks every we-are-hiding we-are-hidden thought she can. A moment passes and she realizes she’s whispering over and over, barely audible even to her own ears. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”

Thudding steps sound above them. A scraping sound, snuffling, the faint smell of rot. Mabel’s heart pounds in her chest but she keeps her thoughts looping hidden-hidden-hidden, lovely dark and deep.

It feels like an hour, a day, a lifetime. But eventually the sounds and the smell recede. The thing goes away. It doesn’t find them. Mabel dares to open her eyes. Dipper is staring at her, sweating, his hand shaking in hers. “It’s gone,” he says. “It’s been gone.”

They sit there for a while longer, heartbeats slowing, breath calming. Mabel leans over, her head falling on Dipper’s shoulder, and he lets go of her hand so he can wrap his arm around her shoulders and hold her, resting his cheek on the top of her head. After a long moment he asks quietly, “Were you quoting Robert Frost?”

Mabel blinks. “I guess so. It wasn’t on purpose. I was thinking hidden-and-safe thoughts, and– dark, deep woods that keep you hidden are pretty lovely, I guess.” Dipper laughs a little into her hair. It’s still a tight, nervous laugh, but it’s a laugh.

They stand up slowly, muscles aching and protesting. They find the biggest chunks of rock they can carry, just to be prepared, just in case. And they slowly start walking back towards the camp grounds, following the distant flashing red-and-blue lights.

The place is crawling with police. Someone must have heard Mabel screaming after all. They drop their rocks at the edge of the trees and try to creep unnoticed through the throng, but someone points to them and says something, and then the police are there. Mabel’s head swims but she and Dipper manage to talk to them. They easily fall into a lie together that it was a man who attacked Mabel, they didn’t see which way he went. The questions go on for too long, but eventually they’re released, and they make their way back to the Warrior.

It feels strangely still inside. Neither of them have appetites, but their bodies need food, so they make instant noodles and eat in silence. They take turns cramming themselves into their tiny on-board shower because although they showered before, they’ve since gotten covered in sweat and dirt and leaves. Mabel washes her hair again and smells the stink of fear in her own sweat. She scrubs and scrubs until all she smells is soap.

Dipper folds down the Warrior’s couch – it goes down into a makeshift bed. They both crawl onto it and pull up a blanket, curled against each other. Mabel tucks her face against Dipper’s shoulder. He smells like soap, too.

“I don’t think it’s gonna come through all the police to get at us,” Dipper says. The police, it seems, are staying on site through the night. But they have a baseball bat next to them anyway.

Mabel rests her hand on his side. “They’re gonna go look in the woods for the man we made up. Do you think it’s gonna go after them?”

Dipper is silent for too long before he answers, “No. That thing– that thing wanted me, Mabel.”

She closes her eyes. She knows that. She heard what it said. It went after Dipper, because Dipper is marked. He smells of the Eye.

“We should call the grunkles,” she whispers. “If you’re marked, then so are they.”

Dipper doesn’t respond. Then he shifts and puts both arms around Mabel, pulling her close against him. She can feel his heart beating. “Okay.” That’s all he says. And Mabel bites her lip and tries to let sleep come, even if it brings nightmares, because the longer she stays awake, the more she’s going to think about how she’s brought all of this on him when all he’s ever deserved is to be safe and happy and whole.

 

–

 

_**Please, let’s go home.** _

Dipper has every intention of calling Ford first thing in the morning, but he wakes up instead to his phone ringing. It’s Ford, calling him.

The thing Mabel saw in Gravity Falls was still there after all. Ford and Stan killed it last night, and Ford’s been hunting down information as fast as he can since then, tapping into whatever networks are available.

“There’s no name for it,” Ford tells him. His voice sounds tinny over the phone, which is on speaker. Dipper holds his phone, and Mabel sits next to him, knees hugged to her chest, and they listen together in the morning light. “There are only three of them that have been tracked, currently. Two, now. They feed–” He hesitates. Dipper’s stomach feels heavy. “They feed through a sort of proboscis,” Ford continues, “that comes out of the indentation in their foreheads. They insert it into the cranium of the victim and remove the brain. Sometimes they also break down the body and feed on the blood, though that seems to be… optional.”

There’s no spark of excitement in his voice. This isn’t anything to be curious or intrigued about. Not now.

“They’re fast, and stronger than any typical human. But they can be killed. We cut off the head, and that worked. There may be other ways, but it can be done.”

“Grunkle Ford,” Mabel says, softly enough that Dipper isn’t even sure Ford can hear her through the speakerphone, “why– why is going after people Bill has possessed?”

Dipper looks at her. Her brow is furrowed and she’s staring the phone like that object itself has the answers for her. Ford pauses, then says, “I can’t be certain. But these creatures seem… evil. I hesitate to use that term because it’s rarely quite true of things, but– I think we can agree it applies to certain things. And so I think they find the… the aftermath of Bill’s possession to be particularly… appetizing.”

Dipper tries to ignore the shiver that runs through his core. “It’s evil,” he says. “Mabel and I both… When we saw it, it was just… Primal fear. I guess next time we’ll just have to be ready.”

“Do you think,” Mabel asks, “the fact that we’re out here looking for trouble is drawing it to us?”

“To me,” Dipper corrects, and he hears Mabel take in a sharp breath.

“You’re not looking for trouble,” Ford says, surprisingly gentle. “You’re looking to help. And if that were true, why would one have come to Stan and me?”

Mabel shrugs, then picks at her chipped nail polish.

The conversation with Ford winds down, covering possible defense and offense methods against the thing. Eventually he lets them go, with a last, “Be careful. But be brave. You both are more than capable of handling this.” They say goodbye, and Dipper hangs up.

Silence settles heavy in the Warrior. Mabel’s looking up at her strand of fairy lights and biting her lip. Dipper takes a deep breath and runs his fingers through his hair. Finally he says, “Thanks.”

She looks at him and raises her eyebrows. “For?”

“For protecting us.” He looks back at her, sees her face soften. “Weird poem-quoting or not, you hid us out there last night. And these.” He touches her back, his fingertip tracing the lines of the sigils tattooed between her shoulders, above the line of her tank top. She shivers a little. “I guess we know they really are helping us after all. Because there’s no other reason that thing shouldn’t have jumped down after us.”

Mabel stares at him with an expression he can’t even being to read, not because he can’t read her (of course he can) but because there’s too many different emotions in her face at the same time. And finally she says, “Let’s go home.”

Dipper balks. Of all the things she could have said, that was not anything he expected. “What?”

“Please, Dipper. I can’t do this. I can’t let you– I can’t watch you–” Her eyes are wide and her hands are twisting in the blanket. “I meant everything I said yesterday, about how when you hurt, I hurt, and I can’t– I can’t keep going, knowing that you’re–” She stops, her lips move but no words come out, and she drops her gaze, biting her lip.

There. There, quietly, but firmly, steadily, a small flame of resolve ignites in Dipper’s chest. He knows it; he’s felt it before. It’s there whenever Mabel needs him, and the longer he tends it, the brighter and stronger it grows. He leans in. “Hey.” His hands are on her shoulders, and she looks back up at him. “Don’t be scared, Mabel. This thing is serious, and terrifying, and it’s fucked up. But we’re out here for a reason. I want to keep traveling with you, and I want to keep trying. Pines are strong, right? And resilient. And we can do this. We’re not gonna gain anything by running away. We’ll be more alert, and more respectful of danger, and if we see that thing again, we’ll be ready.” He smiles. “So don’t be scared. Okay? We’ll beat this. Together. Like we always do.”

She looks at him, those brown eyes so full. Then she reaches up her hands and takes gentle hold of his face, pulls him to her, and kisses him.

His eyes snap wide and his hands tense on her shoulders. A pleasant, fluttering rush goes through him, in chest, his stomach, and lower, and he wonders briefly, vaguely, if this is quite within the unspoken lines drawn for this sort of thing between them. But then she’s pulling away and leaning her forehead against his, eyes closed, breath soft against his chin, and he lets the overworking gears in his mind take a rest as he softens his hands on her shoulders. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.” And in this moment, that one word is what he needs to hear, and is enough.


	4. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happens when two people with a ton of supernatural-related baggage go looking for the supernatural.
> 
> Two parts shenanigans, five parts emotional issues, three parts spookiness & horror, two parts hurt/comfort, four parts heartwarming love, intimacy, support. And, of course, pinecest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little bit NSFW. It’s very brief and tame (barely more than suggested, to be honest), but it’s there. Also, you know how up there I mentioned “five parts emotional issues”? Yeah. At least three of those five parts are condensed in this chapter. You’ve been warned.

_**Small birds, dry grass.** _

It was a good call, choosing a small RV. It makes it so easy to pull off the highway in the middle of rural Illinois, find a good spot at the edge of a big old field, and rest for a while. That’s one thing Mabel’s done right, at least.

She shakes her head. No. Nope. Not thinking those thoughts right now. Right now is for relaxing and enjoying the sunset.

They’ve been driving for a while and are nearly to their planned stop for the night, but the sunset is coming down so awesomely pretty in layers of gold and pink and purple and blue, and Dipper’s been complaining about his butt hurting anyway, and this field is so big and full of tiny yellow flowers.

She stands next to Dipper. They pass a can of Pitt back and forth between them, and they watch the sunset.

The heat is finally diminishing as dusk sets in. It’s been boiling all day, and dry; the grass near the road is all yellow and stamped-down. But a cool tingle runs down Mabel’s arms now from the breeze. It promises a more bearable night.

It’s nice – to pause and be still and be calm.

They ended up spending two more full days at the campground in Iowa. Mabel had felt like her teeth were on edge the entire time, but the thing with no eyes never came back for them. Dipper credited it to the wards Mabel continuously threw up around the Warrior, to the sigils inked on their bodies, to all her protection spells.

She closes her fingers around the small vial of glittery purple sand at the end of her necklace. She doesn’t know if Dipper’s right, but she’s glad for their safety anyway. And hearing him believe in her makes her feel like he might be right about everything else – about them staying out here, on the road.

Watching the sunset with her brother, she has to admit this would be awfully hard to give up.

The colors of the sunset are gorgeous as they shift deeper, and the soft, sing-song chatter of nearby birds is soothing. Mabel lets herself smile. All the gross, ugly stuff she’s been feeling is still there, tangled up in a writhing mass, but she’s managing to keep it fairly contained. Denial and pretending things are fine when they aren’t are perhaps not the healthiest coping methods (she knows they aren’t; years of therapy have taught her to be wiser than that) but common sense can kiss her ample ass. Dipper wants to stay on their course. So she’ll fake it ‘til she makes it. Pretend she’s okay until she is okay. Because she’ll figure out all this guilt-and-doubt garbage at some point. Definitely. Absolutely. Maybe.

Okay, not super encouraging. But there’s hope. Maybe these thoughts are just some simple clouds that’ll drift on by without raining down a full-on storm. She can hope, and she can try to push them along.

“Ready?” Dipper asks.

She looks over at him. He’s smiling at her, the sunset washing his face in golden light. It’s so nice, this moment, not going anywhere or facing anything or having to worry.

“In a minute,” she says, turning back to the sunset. “I’m really enjoying this.”

Dipper doesn’t argue. They stand together, watching the sun, and Mabel hopes that somehow its golden glow will seep into her, break up the clouds, and not let her keep getting tangled up in these thoughts. She can hope.

 

–

 

_**A hero in the wrong.** _

In the middle of Illinois, they find a nice lake to park by for the night. It’s not a proper campground, so Mabel makes sure to put up some hey-law-enforcement-please-don’t-notice-us wards around the Warrior. They’ve been holding really well so far in their travels. As have, apparently, her other protections. Dipper brushes his teeth and stares in the mirror at the sigils inked on his chest. It still feels a little weird to see them there and be aware of their permanence. But permanence is good. This is the life he wants, and these sigils seem to be doing their job in keeping him safe and solid and strong. Mabel did good work.

He spits out his toothpaste and runs the tap just long enough to rinse his brush and rinse out his mouth. Then he squeezes through the tiny doorway back into the main space of the Warrior.

The lights are already out. The only illumination comes from the tealight candle that’s almost burned out on the table and from Mabel’s string of lights up in the loft. She’s sitting up there, cross-legged in a tank top and bare legs, with tarot cards laid out on the blanket in front of her.

Dipper sits on his couch and leans an elbow on the edge of the loft. “Doing a reading for yourself?”

Mabel nods, her brow furrowed. She stares at the cards, then drops her chin in her hand and sighs.

He nudges her knee. “What’s up?”

She shakes her head, then starts gathering up the cards. “Oh, just these things. They’re so sassy sometimes. I go looking for answers and they tell me stuff that I already know.” She sticks out her tongue as she shuffles the cards and then starts wrapping them in the silk scarf she keeps them in. “Like, I’m obviously looking for new answers because I don’t like the ones I already have. But nooo, they’ve gotta sass me and tell me to cut that out.” She flashes Dipper a small smile, and he smiles back. He doesn’t really get it when she talks about her tarot cards like they have a personality, but hell, he’s seen weirder stuff, so he rolls with it.

“So where do you want to head tomorrow?” he asks. “We can keep heading east, or we could swing up north towards Wisconsin or Michigan.”

Mabel starts to answer him. But then her gaze flicks up past him and her eyes widen and lips part with a tiny squeak. She leans forward and grabs his hand. “Dipper,” she hisses. “There’s something outside.”

A spike of adrenaline hits him with a jolt. “Is it–”

“No, it’s not– that thing. It’s something all big and bulky like a bear. Are there bears in Illinois?”

Dipper scoots over to peer out the window. It’s hard to see out there in the darkness, but he can just make out a massive shape down closer to the water. It doesn’t quite look like a bear. And what’s more, Dipper can hear a voice. The words themselves don’t reach him, but it’s unmistakably speech.

He turns to Mabel. “Put on your boots, Mabes. The mystery twins are needed.”

She grabs a pair of socks and tugs her boots on, lacing them up. “So you’re sure it’s not a bear?”

“Not unless bears have learned to talk.” Dipper moves quietly through the Warrior, grabbing one of their flashlights and shoving a few things into his backpack. “Man, we’re stupid, going out at midnight to poke around some huge supernatural thing that we know absolutely nothing about.”

“Well, it’s what we do. Put on a shirt, mister. We can’t go into battle bare-chested.”

They unlatch and push open the door as silently as possible, and Mabel closes it without more than a tiny, soft click. Dipper makes a hand motion to her, and they creep together around to the front of the Warrior, crouching behind the cab and peering out towards the lake.

The thing is sitting down there, a little clearer now in the moonlight. It has broad, furry shoulders and isn’t moving. Still communicating with glances, nods, and hand motions, Dipper and Mabel sneak over to a nearby tree, then to another tree, coming closer to the creature. When they’re nearer, the creature’s speech becomes discernable, and Dipper turns to look at Mabel.

“Are those… BABBA lyrics?” he mouths.

She nods, her eyebrows raised.

Dipper turns back towards the creature and steps out from behind the tree, turning on his flashlight.

The creature makes a startled, oddly high-pitched noise and turns. It blinks in the flashlight beam. Its body is bearlike, but its face looks like someone mashed together a bear and a wolf. It raises one paw to shield its eyes. “Good heavens! My goodness!”

“Were you just reciting BABBA songs to yourself?” Dipper asks.

“Please don’t judge me for it.” The wolf-bear is still shielding its eyes. “I’m a terrible singer, so I just say the words instead of singing them. It’s sad, I know, but– could you please stop shining that in my eyes?”

“Oh. Sorry, man.” Dipper angles the flashlight down.

Mabel comes up to his side, peering up at the wolf-bear. “Why don’t you just sing anyway? It doesn’t matter if you don’t sound good. All that matters is that you enjoy yourself.”

The wolf-bear crinkles its mouth in what Dipper guesses is its version of a smile. “People tell me that all the time. Maybe one of these days I’ll listen.” It blinks at them. “What are you doing out here, young humans? Usually there are no humans here at night. Though I thank you for pointing flashlights at me instead of guns.”

“We’re just parking for the night,” Dipper says. “We’re kind of laying low.”

“I assume you mean from other humans,” says the wolf-bear. “If you’re trying to hide from creatures like me, you may have trouble. You’re a bit of a walking beacon.”

Dipper furrows his brow. “How?”

“You carry a mark, my boy. Anyone of my kind can sense it on you.” It makes a snuffling noise. “I’d normally be more wary, but it’s an old mark. The Cipher has clearly come and gone from you, so I imagine there’s no danger left.”

Dipper sighs. He glances sidelong at Mabel; she’s tense, her mouth a hard line. This again. “Yeah. I kind of… heard recently that I’m, um– what you said. Marked. Although we’ve been hearing people call him the Eye.”

“He has a number of names. But his signature is very… unique.” The wolf-bear pats the sand next to itself. “You can come sit with me, if you want. You don’t have to worry. I don’t eat humans.”

Dipper glances again at Mabel. She’s not moving, so he nudges her arm. Her face clears, and she goes with him and sits by the wolf-bear. “We surprised you, though,” she says as they settle down on the sand. “You can sense Dipper’s mark now, but you didn’t notice us here before.”

“No.” The wolf-bear looks over towards the Warrior. “You shield yourself well. That’s probably for the best.”

Digging a small indent in the sand, Dipper settles the flashlight into it, beam pointing up. “I’m glad we have your protections, Mabel. Knowing that supernatural stuff can sense when I’m around… it kind of throws a wrench in us hunting stuff down.” He lifts a hand and rubs his eyes, sighing. “Damn it. Bill didn’t screw us over enough when he was alive, huh? He’s gotta keep screwing me over even now.” He looks up at her. “You’re awfully quiet. Aren’t you excited to meet a wolf-bear?”

“Bear-wolf,” the creature corrects. “Not Beowulf, but bear-wolf. You wouldn’t believe how often people get that wrong.”

“No, I’m excited.” She does that thing again where her expression clears, where she sounds like she’s just waking up when she speaks. He looks at her, questioning, but she just smiles and looks up a the bear-wolf and says, “Dipper met someone like you before. A big ol’ bear who liked BABBA.”

“The multibear?” The bear-wolf grins its weird grin at them again. “Ah, I remember him fondly. We’re cousins, of a sort. Bonded more through our mutual love of BABBA than through our bearishness, seeing as he’s a multibear and I’m a bear-wolf.”

“Sing 'Disco Girl’ with us,” Mabel says. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t sound good. Neither of us sing that well but we still do it 'cause it’s fun.” She’s smiling a little too wide, her eyes almost glassy, but her voice sounds sincere, so Dipper stops staring at her intently and instead lets himself launch into the chorus of that old favorite.

They sing a few songs, and the bear-wolf tells them how it comes down to the lake to look at the stars, and they point out constellations together until Mabel starts yawning. When the bear-wolf bids them goodnight, it offers to stay near the Warrior until morning, just as a back-up, if they’d like. Dipper thanks him, and they go back into the Warrior and into bed.

Mabel is faintly snoring up in her loft pretty quickly, but Dipper lies on his couch, still wide awake. He pulls up the blinds on the window over the couch just a couple inches so he can see the sky, and the stars.

He remembers the card reading Mabel did for him. He had given her a little bit of grief about it then, but the things she said had been true. It makes sense, he thinks, that defeating Bill and all the things they went through that first summer in Gravity Falls would give them the strength, the knowledge, and – what had her words been – the authority now to seek out other supernatural things. But was this the kickback? Sure, he has the knowledge and authority to handle paranormal shit, but the price he pays for it is being so clearly branded that paranormal beings can see him coming?

Turning over, he flops onto his stomach, the side of his face pressed into his pillow. Apparently it’s not enough to have a fucked-up brainspace. He’s gotta have this, too.

Dipper closes his eyes, listening to Mabel’s soft breathing. At least he has her. And even when things are shitty – when he jolts awake from nightmares or lives one in his waking hours up against the brain-sucker with no eyes – even then, he’s glad Mabel had this idea, made this plan. Because this life isn’t easy, but it’s a life together. And even if the supernatural messes him up, in some ways, it’s what he knows best. That, and Mabel. And with the two together, he feels like this is where he’s supposed to be.

If it hurts sometimes, that’s just because life hurts sometimes. He’d rather hurt here, with her, than anywhere else. And nobody else can heal him like she can.

He closes his eyes. Out in the night, he hears the bear-wolf start to sing off-key. He smiles, and slowly, sleep finds him.

 

–

 

_**Unearthed bones.** _

The further they drive, the more tired Mabel gets.

It’s not the travel in and of itself. She doesn’t mind the travel-mug-of-coffee mornings with her sunglasses on as they drive further east into the rising sun, the crackle of the radio (by this point in their roadtripping life, they alternate between CDs and the radio because they’ve driven over 2000 miles now, and even with a whole CD binder to choose from, some of it starts to get old), the warm early-September wind coming through the half-rolled-down windows.

Nor does she mind the simple meals they prepare when they don’t go out to restaurants, the instant noodles and cans of soup and toast-and-eggs and instant oatmeal. (Restaurants are good for variety, but budgeting is also something they keep in mind – Dipper’s better at it than she is, but she tries very hard to keep track of things because this was, after all, her idea.) They pick up lots of fresh fruit for snacks every few days, and their tiny fridge has enough room in its little freezer for a few bags of frozen veggies they can heat up and toss into their noodles or alongside their eggs. It gets kind of repetitive, but it’s nothing a bottle of hot sauce can’t help.

And of course she doesn’t mind being in such close proximity to Dipper all the time. Well, okay, yes, sometimes they get cabin-fever-y and snip at each other, or have short-lived but mildly volcanic fights about how her sweatshirts take up too much room or how I know showering in the RV is a pain in the ass, Dipper, but if you don’t bathe soon I’m going to throw you out of here before I suffocate from your stanky B.O. But the majority of the time, everything is fine, and being close to him makes her feel better, safer, stronger. And when they do get cabin-fever-y, they stop somewhere nice and go explore a town or go on a hike, or one of them will go pick up groceries while the other has some alone time in the Warrior.

It’s none of that. What’s making her so, so tired is her endless stream of thoughts and how hard she’s trying to pretend she’s fine.

Like when Dipper asks her if she minds driving for a while, he feels kind of funky, he wants to go lie down in the back. And like, she doesn’t mind driving. But she sees the tension in his shoulders, the way he scratches the back of his neck, and she knows “funky” means he’s thinking way too much about the stuff that drags him down. Which, presently, most likely means this whole business about how Bill possessing him has permanently marked him in a way supernatural beings can sense. So she keeps driving them eastward towards Indiana. And in the back of her mind, a cold little voice whispers to her, _This never would have happened if you’d just let him stay home._

She’s so damn tired of that voice.

But it won’t shut up, these days. They’re coming up on their one-month anniversary of living on the road, and Mabel knows she should be excited and proud and happy. She wants to be excited and proud and happy. She worked hard for this. She gave up so much for this. And she never regretted a second of it because she knew this was the right thing for them, a way for them to be together, a way for her to protect him.

As it turns out, she hasn’t been able to protect him at all.

Sure, her wards and sigils are keeping the worst of things away. But she knows they can handle monsters (even that thing with the long arms – it sends needles of primal fear through her body, it shakes her to her core, but she knows they can do it, they have to, they have to). What’s hard are the things that happen on the inside. And Dipper has a lot going on inside already, already has too much trauma piled up on his poor head. He doesn’t need another piece to make the pile heavier.

And she went and dragged him out here and now they know his pile is that much heavier.

It isn’t fair.

They’re making their way through Indiana now. They could drive across the entire state in one morning if they wanted, but they keep their usual method of wandering around a bit, finding side-roads and small towns to stop off in for the afternoon or overnight, taking time to get out of the Warrior and poke around, both for the diversion of it and to see if there’s any weirdness going down they can help with. Nothing major grabs them. (They do run into a haunting in one cornfed little town, but it’s a really benign ghost and they do more to make peace between the residents and the ghost than to actually banish it.)

The break is kind of nice, but it gives Mabel way, way too much time to think. She’s just not an overthinker. Never has been. The only time she gets caught up in these thought-loops are when bad stuff is going down.

She’s never had quite the same problems as Dipper, nor have hers ever been quite as severe, but to say she came out of her twelfth summer unscathed would be a gigantic fib. There’s been an assortment of things that set her off over the years, and plenty of therapy during high school went a long way in getting things under control. But the one thing that still sets her off to this day is letting people down. Not standard day-to-day things like failing an exam or accidentally standing up a date. Bigger stuff. Stuff where her screwing up makes someone else suffer for it.

It reminds her of the absolute worst parts of being twelve, of being stupid, selfish little Shooting Star, who unleashed the apocalypse and got people she loved tortured, hurt, very nearly killed.

She knows it’s not her fault. (It was nobody’s fault; he’d been playing the Pines family since before she was born.) She knows she shouldn’t blame herself. (She was just a kid, and she had no idea what she held in her hands.) She knows this. She does.

But certain things don’t respond to logic in her head. And to be honest, logic was never her strong suit, anyway.

She was the one who planned this whole new life for them, who said it would be good, who pushed for it. And it’s making Dipper suffer even more, for all he tries to hide it.

They drive on, and Mabel sits with her feet tucked up on her seat, chin in her hand, staring out the window. Maybe this roadtripping ghostbusting life in and of itself isn’t the problem. Maybe they just need to draw the line somewhere. Some of the stuff they do does seem to produce positive results. There’ve been times when they’ve banished a ghost or diverted a disruptive spirit or whatever, and it’s made both her and Dipper excited and proud and pumped up. She sees that gleam in his eyes, that passion for mystery-solving and spook-handling. It’s really, really good. And there’s probably some truth to the idea that using all this paranormal know-how of theirs for good is helping both of them process all the gunk in their brains.

But some stuff is just too much over the edge. The no-eyes, of course, is the best example. It’s too much, too scary, too threatening, too much of a reminder of all the bad shit. And Dipper doesn’t need reminders of the bad shit.

But there’s no practical way to keep this life of theirs confined to the easy stuff.

Mabel closes her eyes. She can still see the sunlight through her eyelids.

This sucks.

And what sucks most of all – what keeps her lying awake staring at the ceiling of her loft on more nights than she’d like to admit – is knowing that Dipper’s the one getting all the flak when everything was just as much her fault.

He’s the one who had Bill in his mind, in his body. He’s the one who wakes up screaming. He’s the one who bears so much of the brunt of this trauma, and who now is apparently flagged to the whole supernatural community because of it.

And it’s not freaking fair. It’s not fair that he suffers so much and she suffers so comparatively little.

It’s why she tries so hard to protect him, help him, ground him. Why she constantly supports him. Why there’s ink in her skin next to her heart committed to keeping him safe. Because she came out of this mess more whole than he did, and that never stops killing her inside.

“Mabel?”

She turns her head. Dipper’s got a look on his face like he’s been trying to get her attention for a while without her noticing. Shoot. “Yeah! Um, what’s up?”

He glances at her, then back at the road. “You okay? You seem… kind of out of it.”

She’s so tired. It’s getting harder and harder to pretend she doesn’t have a sick merry-go-round of poisonous thoughts constantly turning in her mind. She just wants it to be over.

“It’s all good, broski.” She forces a smile onto her face. “Just zoning out at the scenery. You know.”

He pauses. He doesn’t believe her. “Okay. Well, um, do you mind switching out the CD? This one’s played through twice in a row.”

“No problem.” She takes out her CD case, fingers brushing over the texture of all the patches on it, and starts flipping through. She’s not even registering what each CD is, just flipping blindly until she picks one and switches it into the CD player. Cyndi Lauper starts crooning, and Mabel settles back in her seat.

So tired. And it sucks because normally when she gets like this, she talks to Dipper about it, and they work her through it. It takes time, but they figure it out together. But this time, she can’t. Or won’t. Because this time, she doesn’t want to burden him with her problems. Fake it 'til you make it, Mabel. You can do it. Maybe.

She reclines her seat and rolls onto her side, trying to ignore when she feels Dipper look at her. She really, really wants this feeling to go away. Because she’s getting too tired to keep pretending, but telling Dipper what’s bothering her would make everything even worse. All of it sucks, and maybe if she just sleeps, it’ll all be gone when she wakes up, like the Indiana border they’re sure to soon leave behind.

 

–

 

_**The sensation of falling as experienced in a dream.** _

She hasn’t dreamed about Mabelland in years, but she is now.

It’s always so disconcerting. The only thing that helps her realize it’s a dream is that in Mabelland, she’s always twelve, and if she can manage to remember that in reality she’s in her twenties, she can remember that it’s not real. But that’s her only saving grace. Because Mabelland was real, once, but it felt exactly how her dreams feel.

It scares the hell out of her.

She dreams she’s in Mabelland, and everything is overflowing with color and music and glitter, a parody of her interests dialed up to eleven. It’s like eating half a chocolate cake – it seems great at the time, but when it’s over it just leaves a sick, gross feeling all through her. It doesn’t last. It never does. Instead of breaking herself free, the bubble cracks beneath her. Everything goes dark like a light switch is flicked off, and then it shatters, and she falls out into nothingness.

The nothingness is almost better, in a way, because at least it’s not a lie. But it’s more dangerous. She’s not twelve anymore, she’s herself again, and there are things breathing around her in the dark. She feels like she’s falling, but her body isn’t moving. Something breathes like it’s swallowed gravel. She reaches up like she can get back to Mabelland, crawl back into the sugar-coated shell and keep hiding, but then something grabs her arm. She can’t see in the dark, but she feels the claws dig into the flesh of her arm, smells the hot odor of rot and old blood. Dread snakes down her spine, and she knows it’s the thing, the no-eyes, coming straight for her, and all she can think as she hears a sick sound of something emerging from skin is that at least it’s finally coming after her instead of just Dipper.

She wakes up to Dipper touching her hair. She opens her eyes and feels herself starting to cry. Dipper talks to her in a soft voice, soothing tones, and he lies down next to her and puts his arm around her, his hand strong against her back. She crumples against his chest and takes a sharp breath in through her nose, trying to stop the tears before they come rushing out. She doesn’t want to cry. She doesn’t want to cry. She doesn’t want to cry.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks. His fingers are stroking through her hair, so soft, so gentle.

Mabel hesitates. “It was Mabelland,” she says. She doesn’t mention the no-eyes.

He sighs. She feels his breath rush against her forehead. “What do you need, Mabes?” The nickname rolls off his tongue so sweet and tender it makes her want to cry all over again.

“You,” she whispers, so quietly she’s not sure he even hears. “Just you.”

But he must have heard, because he nudges his nose against her forehead until she tips up her chin to look at him. He strokes her hair, strokes her back, and they look at each other in the dimness of the loft. His eyes are so warm and kind. He loves her so much. Her loves her so, so much. God, in all these years, everything they’ve been through, that’s the one thing she’s never questioned. How could she possibly?

And she loves him, loves him, loves him so much it makes her body ache with the force of it. She touches his face and thinks about how lucky she is, so, so lucky to have this wonderful, weird human being as part of her life, part of her self. He’s always taken care of her. And now she tries so hard to take care of him. But she’s tired, now. And right now, in the middle of the night, shaken from dreams, she just wants him to take care of her.

They move toward each other almost at the same time, though she moves a fraction of a second sooner. Mabel’s eyes flutter closed as their lips meet. He kisses her (she kisses him) soft and slow, his hands on her back, her hand cupping his face. She brushes her thumb over his stubble and lets herself sink down into feeling, the warmth of his lips and, eventually, his tongue, the strength of his hands, the soft rush of his breath. Thoughts fall away, everything falls away except the space their two bodies occupy, the space they share together, the warmth shared between their chests.

Dipper shifts up onto his elbow, turning her onto her back, and he settles over her. His hands move on her body, so, so gentle. She wraps her arms under his and up around him, her hands against his back, firm, feeling the solidness of him. And the fear and guilt and doubt fade away to the faintest whisper as she lets herself get further and further lost in his heartbeat, the weight of his hips, the press of his lips against her neck.

She needs to tell him. Now, briefly, with her sadness lying in the background, she can think clearly to admit to herself that she needs to tell him what’s going on. But not now. She shushes the thought, puts it in a box and saves it for later. She’ll open it again. But not now. Right now she just wants to rest, rest, rest her weary mind, to let herself unravel, to feel safe here with him. And she kisses him and touches his hips, and she is safe.

 

–

 

_**How far can you carry this?** _

The morning light glows through the white curtains on the loft windows. It makes everything look soft. Mabel’s piles of pillows and blankets are comfortable, and her body next to his feels soft, too, and warm, and safe.

Dipper closes his eyes again and presses his face against the back of her head, breathing in her scent. It’s soothing.

Waking up next to Mabel – well, waking up naked next to Mabel, anyway – is always a little strange. It’s been a couple years since they first crossed the line into uncharted-and-unconventional territories, but even so, it’s always a peculiar feeling. When Mabel parades around the Warrior (or, before, his apartment) in nothing but her underwear and a tank top, he doesn’t think of her sexily, admiring her legs and ass, like he would a girl he was dating. He would just think ah yes, Mabel, and would feel warm and happy from her presence.

It’s kind of similar when he wakes up next to her. Feeling her body pressed against his does more to stir his heart than it does to stir arousal. Somewhere between twin and lover. It’s a sort of strangeness he doesn’t mind. It’s safe. It’s warm. It keeps him grounded.

She’s still sleeping when he eventually gets up and goes to the bathroom. But by the time he comes back, she’s rolled over and has her eyes open, watching his return. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey.”

He finds his boxers and pulls them on. Mabel yawns, and he tosses her his flannel that’s lying on the back of the couch. She buttons it up and pulls on her underwear.

“You want eggs?” Dipper asks. “We’ve still got a couple left. But we’re gonna need to hit a grocery store soon.”

She doesn’t answer. She’s sitting with her legs crossed, her hands in her lap, the sleeves of his flannel falling over her palms, and she’s staring at her fingers. Her hair is all mussed and her mouth twisted into something like a pout, but sadder.

“Hey.” Dipper steps closer. “You okay?”

She looks up. “Yeah. Um… yeah, let’s have breakfast.”

Mabel stays quiet through eggs and oatmeal with sliced apples. She drinks her coffee but doesn’t seem to perk up. Dipper doesn’t say anything, but he keeps an eye on her as he cleans up the breakfast stuff and she combs out her hair. She’s been retreating further and further into herself the past few days, and last night was probably a symptom of that. They do, after all, only really reach for each other like that when they’re getting lost. Most of the time, anyway.

He waits until she’s braided her hair over her shoulder and is staring out the loft window before he walks over to her, leans his hands on the loft, and says, “Mabes. C'mon.”

She looks at him, and they don’t need to say it. She knows, and he knows. So she sighs and scoots over, and he climbs up next to her.

“It started when we met Lorna,” she says. She’s not meeting his eye anymore. “When she told us you’re marked by Bill. And it’s just kind of snowballed ever since then.”

“What has?” He keeps his voice gentle.

Mabel fidgets with the edge of a blanket. “I just–” She takes a deep breath, scrunches her eyes closed, then lets the words start tumbling out. “I just wanted this whole thing, us being out on the road hunting down baddies, I wanted it to be good, for us to help other people and kind of help ourselves along the way. But I feel like it’s just making you feel worse. And I don’t– I don’t want that, Dipper. I don’t want my stupid plans to make you worse. You already…” She blinks rapidly, looking away, out the window. “You have so much shit to deal with,” she says, her voice getting thick. “You already have way too much weight on you, which isn’t fair anyway, and how much more unfair is it for me to drag you out into something that keeps adding more weight–”

His stomach feels heavy. He can see her eyes glistening and oh god, please don’t cry, please don’t– “And it just sucks,” she says as two big, fat tears roll down her cheeks. Her nose is flushing and she presses the back of her hand to her eyes, but they keep coming. “Because you– you have nightmares about things that only happened because I was so stupid, and it’s like, I know I have my issues, too, but we both know yours are worse, and it’s so messed up that you should be getting the harder end of the deal when it’s my fault–” Her voice pitches up and she stops for a moment, hands pressed to her mouth, breathing in deeply.

Dipper lifts his hand and rubs her back. He wants to grab her and pull her close and tell her to shut up, please stop thinking these things, it’s not your fault not your fault. But he knows her. And he knows she needs to get it all out. So he bites his tongue and presses comforting circles into her back.

“There’s all that in the first place,” she continues, “and now I’ve gone and made you live a life that’s this constant reminder of it all. You’ve had to make your stupid tea and I can tell this stuff is bugging you and it’s not fair to you, it’s not, and knowing that I’m the one who hurt you, who made you–” She stops, dropping her head into her hands, and her shoulders shake as quiet, keening sounds escape her.

And now Dipper finally does reach out both arms, one around her back and one down around her waist, and tucks his head down on her shoulder. He holds her steady while she cries, and he speaks softly right next to her ear. “Mabel, I want you to listen to me, okay? I know you’re upset. But please listen to me.” She nods, fists pressed to her eyes. “I need you to know that I’m out here with you because I want to be. You didn’t drag me into anything. I got fucking tattoos, y'know? For this. For this life. Because I choose it, too. So don’t think I’m here any less than a hundred percent. And–” He takes a deep breath. “You’ve been trying too hard to carry all this on your own. We’re in this thing together, remember? Not just being on the road, but everything we face. We’ve always been together. We support each other. And I’m–”

He sighs, turning his face against her neck for a moment, feeling her in his arms and feeling his heart swell with gratitude, with love. Then he lifts his face again and says, “I’m so grateful for you. Every damn day, Mabel. Because you do help me. You do protect me. Just like I help and protect you. But you’ve gotta let me, Mabes. I know… I know I get pretty bad sometimes. And you’ve been so amazing about helping me.” He feels her growing stiller in his arms, her sobs quieting. She sniffles. “But you’ve been trying to do all the protecting for a long time now. And I’m grateful, and I’m proud of you, but neither of us can do it alone. We need each other, y'know?” He kisses the side of her face, next to her ear. “We both need help, so we help each other. So just let me support you, too. Relax a little. Let me protect you, too.”

Mabel wipes her eyes, still sniffling. She turns and lifts her head, her face close to his. She’s all blotchy and damp from crying, her eyes shining in that way they do after too many tears. She blinks a few times, then leans her forehead against his. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly.

“Hey. Hey. No apologizing. You have nothing to apologize for.” He wipes her cheek with his thumb. “Just take it easy, Mabes. Don’t put all the pressure on yourself. We’ve got a good thing going as long as we’re supporting each other. That’s what keeps us doing okay.”

She nods, pulling back a couple inches so she doesn’t bonk his forehead with hers. “I know. I know. It’s just–” Her hands come up to his shoulders. “It hurts so much when you’re hurting. I want to make it all go away.”

Dipper half-smiles and lets out a soft chuckle. “How d'you think I feel right now?”

A little laugh escapes her, still thick with the aftermath of tears, but nonetheless a laugh. She looks up, meeting his gaze. “I’m a mess, huh?”

“No more than I ever am.” He looks at her, so many feelings rushing through him. He needs her to know she’s okay, that he’s okay too, but he doesn’t know what to say that he hasn’t already said. So instead he leans in and kisses her.

She makes a small noise of surprise, but she doesn’t pull away. Her hands soften on his shoulders, and he kisses her firm and warm until he feels the tension in her body fading away.

When he pulls back, Mabel bites her lip and glances up at him in an– an almost bashful way, he thinks. “Okay,” she says with something of a giggle.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

He takes her hands in his, and he helps her get up. She washes her face and drinks a glass of water, and he hugs her until she squeaks and calls him a too-tight-hug-giving-squid. They get dressed, and they get on the road for the day.

The trees of eastern Ohio pass by as they head down the highway. Dipper feels Mabel watching him from her place in the passenger seat. He looks over when he can, giving her smiles. And when the traffic is clear, he reaches over his hand, and she takes it. She squeezes it, letting him know she’s still okay, the clouds are on their way to truly passing, and she’ll take the strength he gives her. And they drive on.


	5. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happens when two people with a ton of supernatural-related baggage go looking for the supernatural.
> 
> Two parts shenanigans, five parts emotional issues, three parts spookiness & horror, two parts hurt/comfort, four parts heartwarming love, intimacy, support. And, of course, pinecest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello please enjoy a nice little calm-before-the-storm pre-climactic chapter. Here there be ghosts, gnomes, and more. One more chapter after this!

_**Conversations with the crows.** _

There’s something so incredibly satisfying about a long hike. Dipper ends up sweating, tired, and out of breath with muscles that hurt the next day and, despite his best efforts, sometimes some very uncomfortable chafing. But he never gets sick of it. It always ends up leaving him feeling more alive – and there are times he really needs that.

Traveling across the country has been kind to their hiking adventures. (Mabel, fortunately, is every bit as into it as he is. It’s good to have a hiking buddy; it’s even better to have a hiking buddy who’s your favorite person on the planet.) Every few days they find some trails or just plain wander off, and it’s always good to Dipper. It clears his head.

Pennsylvania is nice for hiking. The trail they’re on now is riddled with moss-covered boulders, some of which they climb over more because they can than because they need to. They’ve been mostly just following the trail for a while now, but Mabel grins at him and cuts over to scramble up on one of the boulders. Dipper shakes his head and smiles and goes after her.

They aren’t talking at the moment. Dipper’s focused more on finding hand- and foot-holds. He catches up to Mabel, breathing hard, and sits next to her on top of the rocks. She holds up a fist, and he bumps it with his, and they grin again.

They sit for a few moments, catching their breath. Then a scraping sound comes from the other side of the rocks. Mabel raises an eyebrow and leans forward. Then a crunching sound. She whips her head around to look back at him. Mystery twins? she mouths.

Dipper nods. He pulls off his cap to wipe sweat off his forehead, then fixes it back in place. And then he and Mabel turn around, swing down their legs, and climb down the back of the boulder.

They climb lower into a recess among the boulders. It’s a little cooler down here, and the scraping and crunching sounds echo. Dipper nods to Mabel, and she follows him down a slope.

There’s an opening in the rocks ahead – more than an alcove, but not quite a cave, with roots from the trees above twisting down around the sides of the recess. Dipper leans around a boulder face to get a better glimpse at it, trying to go unseen by the creature sitting inside.

It’s more or less humanoid, with bony shoulders and sinewy arms and dark, leathery skin with ridges of coarse fur. The greyish-brown of its skin and fur almost blends into the rocks around it. Its face is long, the skull slightly pointed, with sharp cheekbones above a heavy, square jaw. In front of it is a pile of bones of all sizes, some picked clean, some still with flesh clinging to them.

Dipper glances at Mabel, who’s scrunching up her nose. It does kind of smell.

He runs through a quick check in his mind. They haven’t heard of any disappearances in the area lately. And two of the bones are definitely femurs, but they don’t look like the right size for human femurs.

Mabel waits until the creature is crunching into a bone, then uses the sound to cover the noise of her backpack’s zipper. She reaches inside the pack (which is, absurdly, a bright pool-blue and covered in a print of little colorful ice cream cones, popsicles, and bikinis – great for not getting shot by hunters in the woods, but terrible for stealthily sneaking around supernatural creatures) and curls her fingers around the handle of her grappling hook. Just in case. Dipper nods.

The creature either has poor hearing or is entirely too engrossed in its meal of marrow and bone, because Dipper and Mabel manage to creep around the slope and are barely more than six feet away, half-shielded by an outcrop, when the creature’s eyes shift to the side and it recoils slightly at the sight of them.

“It’s cool.” Dipper holds up his open hands, although Mabel’s hand is still inside her backpack. “We come in peace and everything. Just curious.”

The bone-eater stares back at them, eyeing Mabel carefully for an extra moment before saying, “It is not common for humans to notice me.”

“We’re not exactly common humans,” Mabel says.

“Yes, I can see that.” It stares at Mabel’s hand. “You don’t need a weapon. I will not try to eat you. I scavenge my food.”

Dipper feels his shoulders relax a hair, and Mabel withdraws her hand, but she keeps her bag unzipped. “What should we call you?”

“I do not have a name,” the creature says. Its mouth pulls to the side in what looks like a grin. “I am solitary. I need no name.”

“Fair enough. I’m Dipper. This is my sister Mabel. Mind if we ask you a few questions?”

The bone-eater tips its head down in a brief nod.

“Cool.” Dipper adjusts his pack on his shoulders and steps in closer. Mabel trails behind him. “So we’re traveling right now and kind of checking in on supernatural occurrences where ever we go. We’ve got a pretty heavy background in it, so we try to, y'know, help where we can. Anything we should know about the local scene?”

A crunch is his answer. The bone-eater sucks marrow from a smaller bone, then drags its teeth along the surface, scraping up the leftover flesh. Dipper politely keeps his expression neutral despite the increasingly strong smell of old meat. “This place is quiet,” the creature finally says. “There are some gnomes and pixies, a few of my kind, a glade where the singing flowers grow. Nothing sinister walks these woods, if that’s what you seek.”

“Hm.” Mabel finally zips her backpack and swings it back up on her shoulders. “That’s good, I guess.”

The bone-eater picks up another bone and peers up at them as it scrapes off a bit of flesh. “Do you often ask local beings about the state of their land?”

Dipper shrugs. “Not really, no. The supernatural stuff usually kind of finds us.”

“I’m not surprised. You feel more like one of us than one of the humans. Both of you do.”

Mabel shifts her weight. “We’re a hundred percent human.”

“I know. You smell human. But–” The bone-eater looks up at them properly, glancing between them. “I’ve met humans like you before. Not often, but I have. You always are different. For example, saying hello to me and asking me polite questions rather than running away in terror.”

“You are pretty gnarly by human standards,” Mabel says. “But you blend in well with the rocks and trees.”

“As is my nature.” The creature tips its head again; it reminds Dipper of a shrug. “You belong here, I think. It is an uncommon thing for a human, but not a bad thing, I think.”

Dipper nods. The sweat on the back of his neck is cooling here in the shade. He feels strange, then realizes it’s because he doesn’t feel anything in particular. Not upset. Not worried. Not anxious. The bone-eater is right – he and Mabel belong here. It’s what they talked about a month ago, when they said how their family is weird, and they belong in the weirdness.

Huh. Weird.

“But I would be careful,” says the bone-eater.

“About poking around in supernatural biz?” Mabel laughs. “We know it’s dangerous, but careful isn’t quite our style.”

“Not that.” It motions at them with one flat hand. “About the mind-drinkers.”

Now Dipper feels something. A cold trickle going down his spine. “The mind-drinkers,” he says back, his voice coming out dull.

“One has touched you.”

Dipper looks at Mabel. Her eyes are wide, and she’s very still, and he remembers the sight of her cowering against a cinderblock wall, trembling and pale, while the thing with no eyes leaned over her, its heavy claws taking chunks out of the brick behind her. He feels hot and cold and his hands go clammy.

“Yeah,” is all he says.

“They are relentless hunters. Once they choose a meal, they will keep following it. Be wary.” Clatter, clatter go the bones as the creature picks up another. “That is my only advice for you. Beyond that, I believe any human who can greet me as you greeted me is more than capable.”

Dipper’s still looking at Mabel. She finally meets his gaze, and she still looks lost. But then her eyes clear and she closes her fists around the straps of her backpack, and she smiles at him. Not a sweet smile. Her wicked, clever, kick-the-shit-out-of-something grin. It cools the things starting to boil up in him, and he grins back.

“Thanks,” he says to the bone-eater. “I guess we’ll leave you to your meal. Appreciate the advice, man.”

It nods in reply, and they turn to leave. They head back up the slope, and Mabel is already up over the boulders when Dipper pauses and turns back. “Can I ask you something else?”

The bone-eater gives another of its strange grins. “You just did.”

Dipper waits, but the creature waves him on to speak. “Can you– can you tell I’m marked by– Bill Cipher? By the Eye?”

A slow nod is its response.

“But you didn’t mention it.” Dipper feels his scalp starting to itch under his cap. “Everyone else I’ve met – they always bring it up.”

There’s a crunch as the bone-eater breaks another bone in half. “What need is there to mention it? You know he’s been in your mind. And he no longer moves through the worlds. So he no longer has power over you. That makes it no concern of mine.” It sucks out the marrow, then continues. “All who suffer bear scars. On the body, the spirit, or the mind. It is the sign that you survived. You needn’t let it trouble you.”

“Yeah.” Dipper pulls off his cap and runs his fingers through his hair. The fresh air feels good. “Thanks, man.”

It nods, then goes back to its bones. Dipper turns and sees Mabel sitting on top of the nearest boulder, her elbows resting on her knees. She raises her eyebrows at him. “You ready?”

“Yeah.” He climbs up, accepts her offer of her hand to stabilize him. She blows a raspberry at him, and he smiles. They crawl down over the boulders and keep hiking, and they don’t look back.

 

–

 

_**A book infested with ghosts.** _

It’s sunny and warm with just a hint of coolness in the breeze, and they’ve been driving all morning with the windows down on their way to Ithaca (for the Sagan Planet Walk, and a few parks there, and possibly also a brewery). When they stop about forty-five minutes from the city to refuel the Warrior, it’s such a nice day that Dipper asks her if she wants to walk around this little town for a while before getting back on the road. She agrees. It’s a perfect day for exploring.

They find a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that they note to come back to for lunch. Mabel coos for a while over a small pack of dogs trotting down the street with a dog-walker. And Dipper, as they pass the library, asks her if she minds if they stop in.

It’s quiet and dim and cool in the library. It’s also extraordinarily empty. Mabel blinks, eyes adjusting to the dimmer light, and sees only the librarian at the desk and a teenaged kid sitting at one of the tables, surrounded by stacks of books. “Yeesh, this place is a ghost town,” she says. The librarian’s head shoots up and Mabel flinches. “Sorry!” she says, more quietly this time.

“C'mon,” Dipper murmurs, steering Mabel by the elbow over to the reference desk.

The librarian is still watching them. When they get closer, Mabel realizes she looks anxious more than upset about loud-talkers. Her dark hair is falling out of its braid in wisps and she’s turning a pen over and over in her fingers. “Can I help you?” she asks.

“Are you okay?” Mabel asks before Dipper can get out his question.

The librarian’s gaze flickers past them, then back to Mabel. “I’m fine. Can I help you find a book?”

Dipper picks up on the vibe and furrows his brow. “Yeah, in a minute.” He glances back where she was looking, and Mabel follows suit. It’s the kid over at the table. Dipper leans closer to the desk and whispers, “Is that kid bothering you, miss?”

Her eyes widen. She shakes her head. “James didn’t do anything wrong,” she says. “It’s not him.”

“What is it? It’s okay, we can help.”

She shakes her head again. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

Mabel laughs, catching herself so it’s not too loud. Not that there’s anyone in here to bother. It just feels weird to be too loud. “Believe me, no matter what you tell us, we won’t think you’re crazy. We’ve seen it all.”

The librarian – her name tag reads “Darya” – hesitates. Then she leans her head in, looks down at the desktop, and whispers, “It’s the ghost.”

Dipper lets out a sigh of relief, and Mabel feels herself grin. “Well, the right people just walked in your door,” she says. “We just so happen to be pretty good at busting ghosts.”

Darya shakes her head. “You can’t just make it leave. That’s the problem. It only shows up when it’s possessing someone, like it is James right now.”

Mabel looks at Dipper, who looks back over at the kid. “You mean that’s a ghost reading all those books?”

“Yes.”

“It possesses people and just… reads?”

“Yes.” Darya twists her pen faster. “For hours and hours and hours. Nobody can make it leave, and we lose more and more patrons. Being possessed scares them off. I don’t blame them.”

Dipper smiles at her. “Hey. It’s okay. You can relax. We’ll take care of this and put everything right, I promise. Just give us one sec.” He takes Mabel’s hand and pulls her over to the stacks. It smells like paper and dust, and Dipper tips his head close to hers and whispers, “So I’m pretty sure this isn’t a violent, vengeance-y ghost.”

She shakes her head. “Nope. Not if it’s just sitting there reading like a big nerd.”

He sighs, rolling his eyes. “Mabel, cut it out. Reading isn’t inherently nerdy and you know it.”

“Yeah, but he had a book about cuttlefish, of all things.”

“Okay, point taken.” Dipper peers around the stack at the kid, who looks up at them, waves, and goes back to reading. “Jeez. Well, rule number one of ghost hunting: all ghosts have a reason.”

“You didn’t ask for a reason back in Idaho.”

“Because that ghost was being a mean asshole. C'mon, this one isn’t even making stuff float around or lights flicker. Let’s just go talk to it.”

Mabel follows Dipper to the table, and they sit down across from the kid – James – the ghost. He looks up and raises his eyebrows. “Can I help you?”

“We were kinda gonna ask you the same thing,” Dipper says. “What’s the deal, man?”

The ghost shrugs. “I’m not looking for trouble, friend. I never have been. I just want to read.”

Mabel furrows her brow. “That’s all? You just want to… read?”

The ghost nods. Or James’s head, controlled by the ghost, nods. “I was only fifteen when I died,” it says. “But I always loved learning when I was alive. I didn’t have enough time to really learn or expand my mind as much as I wanted to. So since I seem to be stuck in this town, I figure I can spend all this time now on reading and learning.”

Mabel swivels in her chair. “Did you know this?” she asks the librarian. Darya shakes her head. Mabel turns back around. “How does nobody know this?”

“Nobody ever asked,” the ghost says. “Not even a ‘what’s the deal, man’ until you two sat down.”

“But why possess people?” Dipper asks.

The ghosts holds up James’s hands, wiggling the fingers. “Incorporeal ghost body. Can’t touch the books. So I pop into someone’s body while they’re here and borrow them for a while so I can read.” It lowers its hands and looks down at the table. “It’s getting harder, though. I pretty much scared off too many people, so I don’t get that many chances anymore.”

“Because you’re possessing them, dude!” Mabel leans back in her chair, crossing her arms. “Can you blame them? It’s really rude to just shove yourself in someone’s existence without permission. It can be really, really traumatizing. You’re lucky you’re a semi-nice ghost so you probably haven’t fully scarred anyone for life but seriously, not cool.”

The ghost doesn’t look up; James’s cheeks turn red. Good. He should feel bad. Mabel glances sidelong at Dipper, whose lips are pressed together in thought.

“That might be the solution,” Dipper says after a long moment.

“What might?”

He leans his elbows on the table. “Hey man, do you know anyone who’s sympathetic to you? Like, at all?”

The ghost scratches his chin – James’s chin – jeez, this is giving Mabel a headache. “There is one person.”

–

It’s almost one o'clock, and Mabel’s stomach is growling for the lunch she promised it earlier, when the door finally opens again. An older woman with gray hair bobbed to her chin and a pair of bright pink sunglasses stands in the entrance. “Are you all right, Darya?” she asks. “You sounded so worried on the phone– oh, hello.”

Mabel raises a hand and waves. “Hi, Ms. June.”

“He’s here, Ms. June,” Darya says. “The ghost.”

“Oh, well, damn.” Ms. June removes her sunglasses. “Which of these poor kids is he bothering?”

“Actually, it’s James McKenzie.”

“Ms. June,” Dipper says, “we’re told you’re the head librarian.”

“That’s right.”

Mabel jerks her thumb towards the table. “Would you mind sitting with us? We should all have a chat.”

They sit down across from James – from the ghost – who looks up at the head librarian cautiously. “Hello,” she says to him. He stares at her with wide eyes. Kind of hopeful eyes, Mabel realizes.

“Did you know the only reason this ghost possesses people is so he can read and keep learning?” Dipper asks.

Ms. June sighs. She sits up straight in her chair, her hands folded in her lap over her khaki skirt. “Not in so many words. But he’s never really harmed anyone, other than the shock of it. Never even caused a fuss or knocked a book off the shelf. Just takes over someone, then sits there and reads. It’s always seemed awfully lonely.”

“I just want to keep learning,” the ghost says.

“But we’ve pointed out to him that possessing people against their will is pretty rude,” Mabel says. “He says he was only fifteen when he died, so, y'know, possibly not the best judgment. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“You seem sympathetic to him,” Dipper says. “But you’ve never talked with each other?”

The fluorescent lights glare against Ms. June’s pale hair as she bows her head. “No. Oh, damn, I feel like it’s so rude that I haven’t. But I didn’t know how to go about it. Even once we figured out and actually accepted that it was a ghost, it’s still just all been so strange.” She lifts her head, looking across at James – at the ghost. “But I always felt a bit sorry for him, once I realized he only wanted to read.”

Mabel chews her lower lip, watching Dipper carefully as he takes off his cap and leans closer, gently. “Ms. June– this is completely up to you, zero pressure. But we just thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask.” He blinks. “Would you be willing to help the ghost read?”

She stares back at him, her face a bit blank. Mabel taps her heel against the floor nervously, waiting. Then Ms. June’s face clears, and she smiles. “I see. Give our ghost friend a willing channel for his pursuit of knowledge.”

“You wouldn’t have to let him possess you,” Mabel cuts in quickly. “I mean, you can do that. But he could just come up all ghostified and have you turn pages for him.”

“It would be nice,” the ghost says. The voice of the boy he’s possessing sounds small and hesitant, now. “I don’t really like scaring people off. I just can’t help it but to read things. If you helped me, I could stop scaring people.”

Ms. June smiles. Her crows-feet crinkle. “I think that would be nice.”

The ghost in James’s body smiles, a wide, free smile. Then his eyes roll back and flutter closed, and James slumps forward onto the table. Behind him, a wavering blue-ish figure emerges, that kind of not-quite-solid but still three-dimensional form that so many ghosts (in Mabel’s experience) take. The ghost doesn’t look a thing like James. Where James is soft and round with shaggy dark hair, the ghost is long and scrawny with curling hair.

“What’s your name, dear?” Ms. June asks.

“Edgar,” the ghost says.

“Well, Edgar, I see here you’re doing quite a bit of reading on sea life. Once you get through these books, I can help you find a book on oceanography to keep branching out your studies.”

Mabel watches them, the soft blue glow just barely cast on the librarian’s face, the smile finally showing on Edgar’s face (and god, he really does look so young, and it makes her wonder how he died, but her mind turns and scurries away from that pretty quickly). Then she looks at Dipper, who’s also looking at the ghost and Ms. June. And she feels her heart swell when she sees the gentle smile on his face, the relaxed line of his shoulders, the ease and pride and satisfaction in his eyes.

He turns and looks at her. His eyes are full of warmth, brimming with an effortless kind of happiness that makes her ache to see. “Sometimes you’ve gotta show them who’s boss,” he says quietly. “But mostly, you just have to talk to them.”

They leave Ms. June and Edgar (and James, who wakes up groggily at the table and is briefly panicked before the librarian calms him; and Darya, who still looks frazzled but immensely relieved). The sunlight outside feels almost too bright. They find their way back to the little restaurant and have an enormous lunch, both of them bright and light and laughing.

Mabel watches Dipper across the table, sees that effortless happiness still shining in his eyes. She’d been worried this particular ghost’s methods would dredge up ugly, rotting things in his mind. But he’s free and clear and smiling, all genuine, all true.

She remembers the tarot reading she did for him. She remembers the ace of wands, the good things it promised for him if he could only figure out how to let himself have them. They’re there, now, in his eyes, in his smile. And Mabel isn’t afraid.

 

–

 

_**Forgetting why it mattered.** _

During the day they play nice with their baggage. During the day they believe in themselves. During the day they have hope. But the night is a different creature; under the vulnerability of sleep, the broken parts of them clatter to life.

Mabel makes a noise like a wounded animal in her sleep. When she jerks awake with a gasp, Dipper is already there, up in the loft with her. He lets her wind herself around him like a vine, shivering and trying to breathe. He presses his fingers hard into her back, telling her with his hands I’m here, I’m here, you’re safe, you’re safe. He stays there until morning.

Dipper wakes from what feels like dreamlessness, but waking is like sitting up out of deep water. His body feels heavy and his chest is weighted. Mabel is already there, stroking his hair and kissing his temple. He lets her hold him, spooned against his back, her hand over his heart. She stays there until morning.

Even when there are no nightmares, Dipper wakes in the middle of the night and stares into the darkness, unable to sleep again. His mind races and forms painful thought-loops until he climbs up in the loft and slips under Mabel’s blanket. When she wakes and turns to look at him, her eyes warm in the dark, and presses against him with her lips on his throat, he takes her in his arms. Her shirt rides up, and her stomach is warm against his. It rides up further, and then he pulls it off entirely. In the morning they wake up smelling of sweat and of each other, but they are calm.

Sometimes they both lie awake, both knowing the other is awake because their breathing never quite goes deep and slow. Mabel comes down to Dipper and sits on the edge of his couch-bed. He sits up and looks at her. In the darkness, he reaches out and touches her cheek, thumb brushing over her lips. He touches her neck, her shoulders, his hand travels down her front and rests high on her thigh. He leans in and kisses her, kisses her, and he pulls her up into his lap, chest to chest, as she winds her arms around his neck and sighs against his lips.

The things that move between them in these nights are not just touches and body heat and soft sounds. They move to one another for a reason, pulled together by the gravity of their fears, their ghosts. During the day, Dipper genuinely thinks healthy things, like how much progress he’s making in handling his traumas, how one more person telling him he’s marked no longer makes panic surge under his skin. But at night he is still afraid, and Mabel can sense it, and she comes to him to soothe it all away. And at night, he can feel the guilt and doubt still radiating off of Mabel, and he goes to her to soothe it all away.

The dialogue between their bodies is more than pleasure. It’s the vulnerability to finally admit that things aren’t all right, but that’s all right. It’s the acceptance of the burdens they carry, so long as they keep holding each other up.

And after, when they’re lying tangled together and their breathing slows and Dipper feels how warm and soft she is as they both drift closer to calm sleep, he thinks of daylight moments when he craves her touch. Leaning his head on her thigh when they sit by a lake. Touching her knees on their birthday and wanting to ask if he can kiss her, but asking something else instead. Her, kissing him, when she wanted him to believe she was okay. Him, kissing her, when he needed her to believe she was okay.

And the lines between daylight and night are not as clear as they once were. This started simply – as she told him, they were taking care of each other. He would break down, and she would ground him. This is still the pattern, but its edges are fuzzier, now. This life, this way they’ve taken themselves up out of the normal rhythms of society and built their own life, their own world, their own way as they travel and try to heal (the world around them, officially; themselves, inevitably) – it’s placed them somewhere in-between, somewhere where the lines are no longer quite as clear as they once were.

But he thinks, as he strokes her arm and she looks at him with eyes full of love – a love that has no single definition he could ever possibly apply – that the lines don’t matter so much anymore. And maybe, at the heart of things, they never really did.

 

–

 

_**The protection of laughter.** _

“You seriously need a shower.”

“Nah.” Dipper shakes his head. “RV showers are the pits. Besides, it’s not like I smell.”

“Dipper, you do. That’s what I’m saying here.” Mabel reaches over to the passenger seat and pokes the side of Dipper’s neck above the hood of his sweatshirt. “Ugh, look, you feel all sticky.”

“I do not. You’re grossly exaggerating.”

“Yeah, well you’re grossly unwashed. I’m the pilot today, which means I’m in charge, which means if I say you need to shower, you need to shower.”

“Big words from someone who hasn’t washed her hair in a week.”

Mabel makes a loud noise of exasperation. “For crying out loud, Dip! Do you know how hard it is to wash all this hair in an RV shower? I’d rather dunk my head in a bucket. At least I’m washing my body, unlike some people.”

“But not your hair.”

“That’s why we have dry shampoo!”

Dipper doesn’t respond. Good. He stares out the window and Mabel drives on.

“Probably full of bugs.”

“ _Ohhh no you did not_.” Mabel laughs despite herself, loud and clear. “Mister, I will pull this Warrior over right now and throw you down and tickle you 'til you pee yourself.”

He’s laughing, too, turning sideways in his seat. “Oh god, please don’t. I’m sorry Mabes. Your hair is beautiful. It smells beautiful.”

“Darn right.”

“Beautiful like aerosol.”

“That’s it!” Mabel whips the Warrior over to the shoulder (inasmuch as she can whip an RV anywhere) and parks it, switching off the engine. “You’ve brought this on yourself, broseph,” she says as she unbuckles her seatbelt.

“Oh no, no, fucking shit shit fuck, Mabel!” Dipper’s laughing, fumbling with his seatbelt, and he only just gets it unbuckled when Mabel swoops in without mercy. Huge peals of laughter erupt from Dipper, bouncing off the windows and filling the cab. “Stop stop stop Mabel no!”

She tickles his sides harder. “Say uncle! Say uncle, nerd!”

“No!” More bursts of laughter. “Someone’s gonna call the cops!” He’s cackling, swatting at her hands, slouching down in the seat in a poor attempt to get away from her tickling fingers. “Witch! Witch! There’s a witch attacking me!”

“Darn tootin’!” Mabel grins, stretching up on her tiptoes to better reach over the arm of the seat to tickle Dipper.

Which, she realizes too late, is a horrible mistake.

Dipper manages to sneak one hand around, and his fingers tickle across the back of her knee– her one true ticklish spot.

Mabel gasp-laughs, then stumbles back, crawling awkwardly up out of the cab into the body of the Warrior. “Nope,” she says, breathing hard. “Nope nope nope. Unfair.”

He grins up at her. “All’s fair in tickle fights.”

“Not backs of knees. Can’t go there. It’s a law.”

“Oh yeah?” He climbs up after her. “Cite the chapter and section.”

Mabel’s legs hit the couch and she falls back onto her butt with a small shriek as Dipper swoops in, taking advantage of the opening. She whoops out a laugh, wriggling as her legs spasm with tickles. “Chapter you-smell-like-farts, section obey-the-alpha-twin!”

“Never!” He leans his knee on the couch, holding her ankle in one hand and tickling with the other. “Say uncle!”

She keeps laughing, can’t stop laughing, but the tickle-spasms are crossing from fun-tickling to miserable-tickling really fast, so she swats at his arm and cries, “Uncle! Stop stop stop, Dipper, for real!”

He immediately withdraws both hands, letting her drop her leg and push her bangs out of her eyes as she catches her breath. He flops on the couch next to her. “Sorry,” he says. He’s breathing hard too. “I know you can’t handle it as long as I can.”

“S'all good. I started it.” She giggles, turning sideways on the couch so she can look at him. They’re both half-lying against the back of the couch, heads lolled to the side on the cushions. She smiles. “Ha. You really do smell up close, though.”

Dipper pulls on the collar of his hoodie and ducks his head down, taking a sniff. “Oh. Woof. I really do. I’ll shower tonight, I promise.”

“Fair enough.” She folds her arms against her chest and closes her eyes. Their foreheads are almost pressed together, and even though he smells kind of funky it’s still nice and warm next to him, and behind Mabel’s closed eyelids she remembers lying near him like this, but in his old bed, with evening sunlight angling through the window, the same feeling of warm shared space, of contentment, of safety. And she remembers making a promise in her mind.

Not that she had ever forgotten about it. But the moment comes back to her, clear and pure, and it makes her heart thrum with that feeling she can never name because it’s too many feelings all at once, but the root of it is love, and it’s only for Dipper.

“Hey.” She opens her eyes, smiling.

“Yeah?”

She lifts a hand and pokes his nose with one finger. “Not attacking you.”

“What?”

“Not a witch attacking you.” She taps his nose. “A witch protecting you. Always.”

Dipper’s eyes soften. He smiles back. “It was just a tickle-fight, Mabes.”

“I know. But y'know. Just saying.”

“I know.” He tips up his face and kisses her forehead, then places a finger against the purple-sand-filled vial hanging at the bottom of her necklace. “And a gross, smelly nerd protecting you, too.”

And as they get up and straighten their clothes and go back down into the cab, turn on the engine and turn on the music and pull back onto the road, windows down and wind ruffling their hair as they sing along at the top of their lungs – Mabel knows. She lets him. By every stupid, silly moment interweaving all the bigger ones, they protect each other. Together. Just as it should be.

 

–

 

_**Each time we climb the stairs, something changes.** _

“My policy with gnomes,” Mabel says, twirling a thick wooden branch like a baton, “is live and let live. Except–” She stops twirling and points the end of the stick directly at the leader gnome. “– when they go being total douche-rockets to innocent bystanders.”

“I’m just plain surprised they have gnomes in New Hampshire,” Dipper says. “Thought they were a west-coast breed.”

The gaggle of gnomes (what _is_ the proper term for a group of gnomes? Dipper makes a mental note to ask Ford the next time they talk) murmur, and their leader bristles. “You can’t stop us from finding our new queen!”

Mabel rolls her eyes, pulling out her phone. “Jeez, Dip, is that all these guys ever do? Kidnap queens? What a drag.” She puts on a jaunty song, then shoves her phone back in her pocket, the volume up. “C'mon, Diplodocus, let’s make this quick.”

“No leaf-blower,” Dipper says with a grin. “But I think we’ll manage.”

It’s not hard to dispatch a group of gnomes when you know their tricks. Or, well, okay, it’s hard in the sense that effort is required. Dipper and Mabel leave that part of the forest out of breath, a bit scraped up, with leaves in their hair and dirt on their knees. But they’re none the worse for the wear. Mabel kept the song on her phone playing the whole time, which provided an oddly motivating soundtrack to their work. She’s twirling her branch again as they walk back to the Warrior.

“That’s so satisfying,” she says.

“Kicking around a bunch of gnomes?”

“When they’re being jerks, yeah. Is that mean? That I enjoy beating up creatures that are like one-tenth my size?”

Dipper grins. “Not when they’re kidnappers and jerks.”

“Good. Then my conscience will rest.”

They stop outside the Warrior, pausing to stretch after their scuffle. Dipper looks up at the trees, at the leaves just starting to turn orange in some places. It’ll be nice to be in New England for fall.

“Hey,” he says.

“Yessir.”

“This is good.”

Mabel raises her eyebrows at him. “Which part?”

“Well, all of it. But–” He gestures between them. “This. This was the first weird thing we ever did together.”

She laughs. “Well, hardly the first weird thing. But the first supernatural thing, yeah. Gnome-busting! Just like old times.” Mabel leans her stick against the Warrior and then leans against its outer wall herself, shoving her hands in her pockets. She’s smiling up at the treetops. “You’re right. This is good.”

They look at each other, and Dipper knows he doesn’t have to say it. They’re both remembering what that first day, ten years ago, taught them: together, they can do anything. The weird things have gotten weirder, and they’re not as innocent as they were back then. But the point still stands. No matter how weird, how dark, how hard it gets, they can do anything together.

But it goes without saying. They look at each other, and he can see in her eyes that she’s thinking the same thing. He can feel it between them. So he smiles, reaches out to her, and blows a raspberry while poking her side. Mabel laughs, swatting his hand away. “All right, mister,” she says, picking up her branch and spinning it once more for good measure. “Back in this Warrior and onwards to Maine!”

They climb into the cab. Mabel flips through her patch-covered CD case and pops one into the player. And they drive away, singing along, with nothing but good things filling up the Warrior.


	6. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happens when two people with a ton of supernatural-related baggage go looking for the supernatural.
> 
> Two parts shenanigans, five parts emotional issues, three parts spookiness & horror, two parts hurt/comfort, four parts heartwarming love, intimacy, support. And, of course, pinecest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus we come to the end of Be Okay. This one has some violence and is also NSFW (but not at the same time!). Are you ready for thrills, chills, and… uh… no more climbing uphill? Ah, I didn’t have a good third one. Oh well. Anyway, I can’t pretend to not be emotional about this chapter, so I’ll just say - this fic meant a lot to me to write and has grown to be very dear to me. Thank you all for coming along on the ride. I’ll see you in Maine…

_**Wildness on the loose.** _

It’s their forty-second day of living on the road. Mabel may or may not have been keeping track by putting a neat grid of glitter stickers inside one of the Warrior’s cabinet doors. It feels like so much longer with everything that’s happened – but at the same time it feels like no time at all. Like she blinked, and suddenly they had crossed the country, come up against a bunch of ghosts and creatures and witches and ex-mermaids (whose number is still in Mabel’s phone, whom she may or may not text now and then), and eaten the same diner breakfast at over a dozen different diners across the states.

They also once hid under a rock ledge while Mabel frantically whispered protection spells over them while the no-eyed mind-drinker tried to find them and kill them, but she’s trying very hard not to think about that.

And despite the few weeks Mabel spent shouldering way too much guilt, it’s been good. It still is good. She looks at Dipper, and she smiles. She doesn’t doubt it anymore.

They’re parked by a lake that straddles the border of New Hampshire and Maine. It’s dusk, and they’re sitting by the water, eating greasy take-out they picked up on their way here. “Can you believe we’ve crossed the whole country?” she asks.

“I mean, yeah. We could’ve done it faster if we weren’t wandering all over the place. If you drove on target for twelve hours a day, you’d make it in a little less than four days.”

“Yeah, but who’d want to do that?”

He grins at her. “Who indeed?”

It’s good. This is good. For all the adventures they’ve had, these moments are still her favorites, deep down: just being together, eating take-out, smiling and joking. It’s all she wants.

They finish dinner and go back inside the Warrior. Dipper cleans up from the meal, and Mabel goes to her supply cupboard and takes out her container of protection powder. She steps back out in the night.

It’s cool now in late September, and she’s grateful for her sweatshirt as she walks in a circle around the Warrior, sprinkling handfuls of powder and murmuring protective words. The powder sifts gently between her fingers. It’s almost meditative, the process of scattering the powder and chanting the spell. It feels like the night opens up around her, with its quiet chatter and velvety air and stillness. She can hear crickets and tree-frogs, and the moon is rising full above the trees.

Then she stops, hand still outstretched, and stares hard out at the trees.

Her heart leaps. She’s almost positive something is there. And it’s something that’s making her palms cold and clammy.

Mabel bangs in through the Warrior’s door. “Grab the weapons,” she says to Dipper, who has his toothbrush hanging out of his mouth. She grabs a candle and a lighter and lights it and starts reciting words she memorized months ago, words of profound protection that match the sigils tattooed on their bodies.

“What’s going on?”

She finishes the first loop of her chant and looks up at him. “I think it’s here.”

A shuffling outside makes them both snap their heads around. “Your wards will hold,” Dipper says. “They always have.”

“The wards are more to keep us from being seen in the first place,” she whispers back. “And I think it saw me.”

They wait. Dipper’s hand is on the handle of the weapons drawer. Mabel holds her breath.

_THUD._

It slams against the door. Mabel’s heart slams against her ribcage as the sound of claws scraping metal grates their ears. “Hurry,” Dipper says, shoving things from the drawer into a duffel bag, tossing her grappling hook to her.

“We can drive away,” she hisses, even as her fingers clip the hook to her belt.

He meets her gaze. More banging, thudding, dents appearing in the door. “It’s not going to stop until it gets to me. Sooner or later we’ve got to do this. You know that.” He grabs her hand, squeezes it, his eyes blazing; then as claws screech against the side of the Warrior again, he puts a bat in her hands. “Out through the cab.” Mabel nods, and they go past the door (god it’s so terrifying to go past the door when it could fall off its hinges any moment), crawl down into the cab, and tumble out the driver’s-side door.

They run down towards the lake, where it’s clearer ground, more room to see what they’re doing. Mabel looks back as they near the shore, and it’s there, rounding the front of the Warrior. It looks pale and wrinkled and sick in the bright moonlight, and it makes a rasping sound and crouches, then gallops towards them.

Her body is pure adrenaline, muscles twitching, heart pounding. But this is exactly the kind of thing adrenaline was made for. She’s scared, primal-fear scared, but she’s also ready. She’s with Dipper, and she loves him, and they’re both strong and brave and relentless, and they can do this, they can do this, they can do this.

“How’s your swing?” she asks, and Dipper barks out a short laugh as the no-eyed creature barrels down on them.

He swings his bat, hard. The metal of it smacks against the mind-drinker’s sagging flesh with a gross sound and thuds against bone. The thing rolls back with a grating, ragged howl, then flips itself over and springs back. It’s so fast, Mabel can hardly track it, and it’s on Dipper again before she has time to register it. He swings his bat, and she cracks hers against the backs of the thing’s legs. It bellows but stays firm, swinging its clawed hands down against Dipper’s shoulders.

He drops. He hisses in pain when his head bounces against the ground. Mabel’s fear spikes, her nerves sparking; Dipper is holding the bat up between himself and the creature, yelling, “Do it, Mabel!” and she reaches into the duffel and her fingers close around the handle of–

She’s on her side, her shoulder aching, and the smell of death and rot is all around her. She gasps and blinks, trying to clear her head. It’s the mind-drinker, hunched over her. No– she sees Dipper still struggling– it’s a second one. God, there are two. There are two.

Mabel pulls her knees in towards her chest, then plants her feet against the mind-drinker’s leg. Its arm is right next to her head, so she ducks down around it, dirt and grass scraping her ear, then shoves off its leg with all the might she can force out of her strong thighs. Her chest presses against the ground as she rolls; she feels the vial on her necklace digging into her breastbone. Keepmesafe keepmesafe keepmesafe. She ends up near the duffel, and she scrabbles in it again for something better than a bat.

A thud behind her, pain cracking across her side. She’s thrown down again. The thing snarls above her. “You haven’t had the Eye,” it rasps, “but you’ll still taste fine.” It swings one clawed hand and she just barely ducks. The tip of the claw slices her forehead and now blood is trickling down, stinging, making her blink. Her breath is coming fast and hard.

Dipper yells. She looks over– and no, no, the other creature is on him, pinning him down, he’s struggling with his strong arms but the no-eyes is stronger, pinning his wrists and his bat is useless three feet away and there’s a sick sound of something emerging from within skin and she knows that sound, she’s heard it in her nightmares, and Dipper is screaming and screaming–

Her fingers close around the handle of the bat. Enough. Enough enough enough– she uses it to push herself up to standing. The mind-drinker is raising its arm to strike at her again, but this time she’s faster as she wraps both hands around the handle of the bat and shoves it straight up, jamming the top of the barrel straight into the socket where the creature’s eyes should be.

It howls, but not like before. It’s a wilder sound, and the creature stumbles back, pawing at its socket. Mabel doesn’t waste time. She turns to the mind-drinker sitting over her brother and swings with all the force her body can give, cracking it across the back of the head.

The thing falls sideways. Its claws are dug into the dirt, still pinning Dipper’s wrists, but it mostly rolls off him. Mabel reaches into the duffel as she watches it. There’s a second, two seconds, now where she can breathe, and it lets her see that the thing is a mess. Blood is trickling down the side of its head from its ear-hole, its mouth is busted open and bleeding, there are welts raised along its arms and sides. Dipper beat the hell out of it before it got him pinned. It almost makes her smile.

She lifts her grappling hook and shoots right at the thing’s arm. Dipper flinches (he’s shaking, oh god he’s shaking so bad) when the hook flies within a foot of his head, but her aim is true, and it strikes the creature’s inner arm. It lets out a gutteral sound and rips its claw out of the ground, showering Dipper with dirt. “Foolish,” it says in its voice like swallowed gravel.

“Yeah, I’m pretty reckless. But I’m okay with it.” And she lifts the crossbow she pulled from the bag.

The mind-drinker pushes off towards her, and it’s so fast her aim isn’t as good this time. The arrow shoots into its shoulder, which barely slows it down. Mabel has a fraction of a second to stabilize her footing before the thing slams into her, but it’s not enough, and she goes down hard, chest spasming for air when her back hitting the ground knocks the wind out of her.

“Nuisance,” the thing growls. It smells like death, and its mouth drips blood. “We’ll drink you first.”

No. _No_. Mabel grits her teeth. The creature is pinning her legs, but before it gets her hands, she grabs the arrow in its shoulder and yanks it out. The mind-drinker bellows, its voice scraping, as the flesh rips open. Mabel wraps her hand firm around the arrow and drives it into the side of the creature’s neck.

The sound it’s making is half-pained, half-furious, but Mabel takes whatever distraction she can get. She rolls to the side; with her legs pinned, she brings the no-eyes along with her. It crashes down on its side, and she grabs the fallen crossbow as she lurches to her feet. One boot goes down hard on the creature’s stomach, pressing into the wrinkled skin. She kneels, knee pressing into its chest. It swings at her, and its claws catch her arms, the blows try to knock her down. but she’s bracing herself with her other leg, and she lifts the crossbow and points the arrow straight at the thing’s open, howling mouth.

“Go to hell,” she says, and she fires.

The thing jerks, spasms, its howls fading into gurgles. Mabel stands up. She realizes she’s drenched in sweat. Her body aches. Her ear stings from scraping along the ground earlier. There are slashes in the sleeves of her sweatshirt that sting on the skin below. She can’t hear the crickets anymore.

In the grass near the creature’s corpse, she sees something purple and faintly glittering. She lifts her hand to–

There’s a shuffling sound behind her, and she turns, raising the crossbow. The other mind-drinker freezes in its tracks. “I’ll kill you,” she says. “I’ll kill you right now. Or you can go. Your choice. But if you go, take this message with you: nothing touches the Pines. We’re off the menu. Any of your kind, or anything like you, wants to hurt us? You’ll get the same treatment. Understood?”

It seems to stare at her, even though it has no eyes. Her chest burns where the sigil is tattooed, the sigil that claims the Pines family strength. She stares down the mind-drinker, and her hand doesn’t shake.

Then it lurches forward. She fires. This time her aim is true.

Mabel drops the crossbow. Her arms suddenly feel weak, almost hollow, almost shivering. She turns away from the two stinking corpses. She kneels next to Dipper, her leg muscles screaming in protest. He’s propped up on one elbow, looking at her, slightly dazed. “Holy shit, Mabes.”

She doesn’t say a word. Just wraps her arms around him, pulling his head against her chest, feeling the solidness of him for several long moments until her breathing evens out again.

Their peaceful glade by the lake smells like death and blood. “Let’s go,” she says. “I’ll drive. We should get you to a hospital and get your head checked.”

He takes her hand, and she helps him to his feet. They support each other as they walk back to the Warrior with their weapons. Its door is dented and scratched, but it still hangs on the hinges. They go inside, throw the weapons on the floor of the shower, and climb down into the cab. It’s one in the morning. Mabel starts the engine, and they drive away.

 

–

 

_**The passage of time as it varies by season.** _

The hours they sit in the emergency room feel formless and endless. First they sit on two hard-cushioned waiting room chairs, curled against each other, for a few hours. When they’re taken back into an exam room, Dipper lies in the bed and Mabel climbs in next to him, he in his little hospital gown and she in her torn-up sweatshirt. Time feels nebulous, and they both fall into a light doze whenever the nurse is out of the room. Their cuts and abrasions are treated, and Dipper is checked for a concussion, which he does not have.

While Dipper is getting his head checked, Mabel goes into the bathroom. First she carefully takes off the necklace Dipper gave her. It feels so small in her hand, now. The vial is cracked almost clean in half, and almost all the glittery purple sand is gone. She carefully puts the pieces in her pocket, trying not to spill any more of the sand.

Then she pulls up her shirt in front of the mirror and gingerly touches her side. It’s all rubbed red and raw, and a giant bruise is already blooming from her hip almost up to her armpit. Over the darkening purple cloud, she can still see the fine black lines inked into the skin of her ribs, the sigil she didn’t tell her brother about. _Dipper is safe_. And he is.

They’re finally discharged at seven in the morning. They walk outside, bone-tired and dragging their feet. The pale morning sunlight feels surreal. The Warrior is still parked in the hospital parking lot, and they go inside, managing to stay upright long enough to strip out of their torn, soiled clothes and to clean the rest of the grass and dirt stains off their skin. Then they crawl into Mabel’s loft and fall asleep.

When they wake at three in the afternoon, it feels like a different day. Dipper makes them two bowls of oatmeal, stirring a spoonful of peanut butter into each. Mabel slices an apple, dividing the pieces between the two of them. Protein, fiber, vitamins. Good nourishment after their bodies have been through a lot. They eat, then crawl back into the loft.

This time they don’t sleep right away. They curl up against each other, legs crossed over each other’s. Mabel has to lie on her right side because her left side is too sore from the massive bruise. They twine their arms around each other; Dipper’s head rests just so on the pillow that he can nuzzle his face against hers softly. They lie together, resting, watching the sunlight slowly fading into the gold of dusk, and eventually they sleep again.

In the morning, things are a little less surreal, a little better. When they wake up, everything still feels quiet and soft, but not quite as heavy on their shoulders. Mabel notices Dipper staring at her. “What?”

“There’s still grass in your hair,” he says.

She reaches up and combs through her hair, pulling out blades of grass. They lay in her palm, and she stares at them for a moment. Then she swings her legs down over the side of the loft, climbs down, and gets a lighter from one of the drawers. She sits at the table and lights the blades of grass on fire one by one, dropping the smoldering tips into a coffee mug. When they’ve all burned, she looks up at Dipper and says, “There. Now it can’t hurt us anymore.”

He actually smiles.

After breakfast, they secure everything in the Warrior, then climb down into the cab. Mabel curls up carefully in her seat, minding her hurt side. Dipper puts the key in the ignition, then pauses. He turns to her. “Where to?” His voice is gentle.

Mabel smiles at him and leans her head against her hand. “Somewhere beautiful.”

For four days, they drive all over Maine, slowly working their way north. It feels like they’re in a kind of limbo. They don’t talk quite as much as usual, don’t blare peppy pop music, and they don’t go looking for supernatural encounters in any of the towns they pass through. They make one quick grocery store trip – during which Mabel glares at the few shoppers she sees staring at the bandages on her face and Dipper’s neck – to stock up, and then they just make their meals in the Warrior instead of going out.

They don’t drive long days. They spend a lot of time resting, together in Mabel’s loft, with the string lights glowing softly and their foreheads gently touching. They open the curtains on the windows all around the loft and look out at the changing leaves, the quiet cold rain, the bright sunsets. Mabel makes them coffee in the mornings. Dipper makes them eggs and turkey sandwiches. They play go fish.

On the morning of the fourth day, Mabel wakes up with her head tucked against Dipper’s shoulder and her socks bunched down around her ankles. She shivers. It’s getting colder as September draws to its close and as they drive further and further north. She pulls the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her fingers and nuzzles her face against Dipper’s shirt. He stirs, one hand coming up to touch her hair.

“Good morning,” he mumbles. His voice is all thick and heavy with sleep, and his breath is all funky and stale. Mabel smiles. “You sleep okay?”

“Like a rock.” She sits up slowly, gingerly, but she finds that her side feels better today. Still tender and sore, but better. “Hey.”

“Yeah.”

She looks down at him. He’s so cute when he’s sleepy in the morning - his nose a little puffy, his eyes still bleary, his hair all a mess. She brushes a thick wave of brown hair back from his forehead. “Remember the guy at the gas station was talking about that lake way up north in the middle of nowhere?”

He meets her gaze. “Yeah.”

Mabel smiles. “I bet it’s really gorgeous this time of year.”

Dipper smiles back at her.

It takes three hours to get there, but it doesn’t feel like three hours. It feels longer, in some ways, as the trees pass and the sky brightens. It feels shorter, in some ways, as Dipper hums to the music while he drives, as Mabel rolls her window down a little and shivers in a good way as the chilly air wakes her up.

They go deep in the woods, almost to the Canadian border, through the tiny tiny town-slash-logging-camp and then up around the lake to a place where nobody can see the Warrior or bother them or ask questions. Mabel quietly sets her protective wards around their camp. When she’s done, she turns back to the Warrior and sees Dipper standing in the doorway, watching her, smiling. The sun is starting to set. She goes to him, and together they go back inside their little home.

 

–

 

_**Sunlight on rumpled sheets & the smell of pine.** _

The northeast feels so different from the northwest. It’s not something Mabel can exactly explain. Of course it’s colder - the nights have been getting below forty degrees, and even in the daytime it barely breaks sixty. And they’ve still got a couple days until October. But it isn’t just that. Something about the way the air feels on her skin, the crispness, the way the sky looks on the water of the lake. It just feels different.

And good. She swears it’s helping them heal.

God knows they need it. She rolls up one of the sleeves of her sweatshirt. The cuts on her arms from the mind-drinker’s clawed hands don’t need bandages anymore, but they’re still there, red lines slowly scabbing over. They itch. She reminds herself that the itching means healing, and she rolls her sleeves back down.

Her arms itch. The cut on her forehead throbs slightly, sometimes, under its bandage. Her entire left side is a nebula of greens and purples as the bruising slowly heals.

She takes a deep breath, pulling clean, cool air deep down into her lungs. The lake is almost still in front of her, the trees around it reaching up yellow and orange to the clear sky. It’s that kind of autumn day where everything feels so bright and clear and crisp and clean.

She hears the Warrior’s door open behind her. It always creaks, now, since the mind-drinker bashed it in. Dipper sits down next to her on the ground, so close his shoulder almost brushes up against hers. He rests his elbows on his knees and looks out across the lake. “This place has no business being this pretty,” he says.

Mabel laughs. “I’ll take it.”

They sit in silence for a while, listening to the birds, watching the clouds drifting across the sky. It’s comfortable and peaceful and still, and it lets Mabel’s mind quiet down and empty out. They’ve both been doing a lot of that in the five days since they fought those creatures – a lot of quieting down and emptying out. “I feel a lot better,” she says.

Dipper looks at her, then back out across the lake. “I know. I do too.” He clears his throat. “This is gonna sound dumb, but it’s like… like all the shit that’s happened so far was all this… this noise, this clutter building up in my head, and in our life. Not always in a bad way, just– it’s just been a lot, you know? But the past few days, it feels like it’s all kind of distilled down, and now I’m just… now we’re just us, y'know?” He looks at her, his brow furrowed a little. “Not crazy monster-hunters or ghost-busters or whatever. Not… not weirdly flagged by Bill. It’s like none of that touches us anymore. Like we’re just – just here. Just us.”

“You’re rambling,” she says, but she’s smiling. She looks up at his warm eyes, and her chest feels just as warm, and her belly feels all fluttery. Jeez. He starts to apologize, but she puts a finger to his lips. “It’s all good, brobro. I’m just teasing.” She ducks her head, looks back out at the lake. “Anyway, I agree.”

She feels him still looking at her for a moment. Then he looks back across the lake too. But his hand comes up between her shoulder blades, trails down her spine, then back up again, rubbing a gentle path up and down her back. She bites her lip as something thrums under her skin at his touch. Inside her boots, she curls her toes.

“Um, hey,” she says. He looks at her. “So– I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t think about it at first, and then I didn’t want to make you sad. But you know the necklace you made me?”

“You haven’t been wearing it,” he says. There’s no judgement in his voice. Just observation. His hand keeps rubbing her back idly, which is sending goosebumps down her arms.

“Yeah. When we were fighting the mind-drinkers, I rolled over it and it broke.” She lowers her gaze to her hands. “I still have the pieces, but most of the sand got lost.”

“It’s okay,” Dipper says. “I mean, I made it to help protect you. And maybe it broke because it did its job and was done working. We’re both still here, y'know.”

She laughs a little. “Or maybe it just broke because I rolled over on it.”

“Aw, c'mon, let there be a little romance to it.” She looks up at him, meeting his gaze. His eyes are so soft right now. A breeze ruffles the hair over his forehead, and Mabel realizes she’s been staring at him, into his eyes, for a few ticks longer than she probably ought to have done. But he’s been gazing back, too. She ducks her head, and he clears his throat.

Dipper rubs his nose with the back of his hand. “Jeez, it’s chilly.” He closes the small distance between their shoulders, fully leaning on her; the hand that was rubbing her back comes down to support his weight, the warmth of his arm now across the back of her shoulders. His head hangs down so his cheek is brushing the side of her face. Mabel feels like the whole right side of her body is hot where his shoulder, arm, hip, leg touch hers, like his body heat is seeping through both of their clothes and under her skin.

She laughs a little. “Well, yeah, we’re in the middle of nowhere in one of the coldest parts of the country. It’s gonna be chilly.” He chuckles; she feels the vibrations from his side pressed against hers. Half of her is hot and half of her is cold. She turns her face towards him.

Her cheek brushes his, his stubble scratching a little, and then the corner of her mouth is just touching the corner of his. She feels – and hears – him take in a small, sharp breath. There’s a twinge in the pit of her belly. Mabel’s eyelids flutter down, her gaze falling somewhere around his lips, though she can’t quite see them properly for the way her face is turned against his. It’s morning, she thinks, and neither of us is upset or broken or afraid. We don’t need it right now.

But, she thinks, in the quietest whisper of a thought – but, I want it.

She tips her head, turns her face, just the smallest bit. Her lips almost, almost brush his. A little shiver goes through her that has nothing to do with the chilly air. There’s a kind of static hanging in the air between them, so thick she’s almost scared to break it. She hears and feels his breath rush heavier, feels his arm flex against her back as his fingers press into the grass. Something at the bottom of her core twinges, aches, and the weight of that static is so much she can barely think. His heart is hammering against his ribs, against her side.

“Fuck it,” Dipper murmurs in a low, hoarse voice. And his hands come up to cradle her face, and he kisses her, suddenly and hard.

A jolt, a charge, a warmth rushes through her limbs, blooming out from the middle of her. Mabel shifts her weight onto her hip and leans into him, her hands coming up to clutch at the collar of his flannel. She parts her lips as she kisses him back, and his mouth, his tongue, are so warm. This is the first time they’ve kissed since they fought the mind-drinkers, and it feels like they’ve been holding it back this whole time. Mabel makes a soft sound, a kind of whimper, and tries to lean into him even more. She wants more, wants to feel more of him.

He gets her, reads her body language perfectly. His hands move from her face to her hips, pulling her closer, onto his lap. Her legs tuck off to the side and she lifts her hands, twines her arms around his neck, breaks her mouth from his and presses a line of kisses and rushes of warm breath across his jaw, down his neck. His fingers twist in the hem of her sweater.

“Come inside,” he says. Through the haze of want, Mabel feels something bubble up in her. She giggles against his collarbone until she pratically feels him roll his eyes as he says, “Yes I know that’s your line, and you know what I mean. Come here.” And he takes her hands and stands and pulls her to her feet, pulls her back in close to him. Her arms go around his waist, and they stumble, tangled together, stealing kisses as they’re able, back to the Warrior, up the step, inside, and Mabel closes the door behind them.

It’s soft and dim in the late-morning light, and Dipper lifts her in his arms and turns in the same motion. Mabel squeaks and clings to him, then laughs, and he sets her down on the edge of the loft. His hands stay low, fingers pressing into the softness of her hips, and she takes his face in her hands, pulls him in, and as she kisses him she slides her hands back into his hair.

There’s a hunger in his kiss, and in hers, and in the press of his fingers, and in the cant of her hips. “Dipper,” she says, and her voice comes out low and heavy and needy. She feels the weight of wanting him all through her body, pooling deep at her core.

He climbs into the loft with her, his hands sliding up underneath her sweater. She hisses in a breath at the pressure of his hand against her bruised side, and he pulls back, looking into her eyes. “I’m okay,” she says. “Don’t you dare stop.” So he kisses her again, moving his hands up to unhook her bra as she kicks off her boots.

They melt into each other, pulling off clothes, bodies pressing tight until Mabel isn’t sure where his leg is or her leg or which of them got her sweater over her head. And then they’re there, and he’s gazing down into her eyes as he strokes her arm, and her fingertips trace his lower lip. He kisses them, softly, and Mabel knows exactly what he meant about everything being distilled down. The only things in the world are herself and Dipper.

He bends his head and drops a line of kisses down her stomach, and she shivers when he gently pushes her thighs open wider. She bites her lip when he lowers his mouth onto her, and she weaves her fingers into his hair, moving them as he moves his tongue against her. She shivers and lets herself moan because the closest people are a mile away on the other side of a lake and they don’t exist right now anyway, and before long she’s keening and squirming as his fingers dig into her thighs. It’s all a rush of heat and sparking, the pressure of his mouth centering on a blissful ache, and then everything unravels as a half-choked cry escapes her and her back lifts up from the bed.

Her body is washed in little waves of warmth and uncoiling, and she feels Dipper pull away and hears him rustling with something – a condom, she realizes dimly, and she blinks and lifts her head as he comes back to her.

“That was new,” she says.

He settles over her, strokes her face, her hair. “You didn’t sound too upset about it.”

Mabel lifts her arms and wraps them around his neck. He lowers his head and kisses her, and she kisses him right back, languid and lazy at first, but then his hands move to her breasts, her hips, and she feels the heat of him against her thigh.

She pulls back, catches his gaze. This time is different. Every other time, it’s been a need. I need you to ground me. I need you to know you’re safe. I need you to take care of me. This time, it’s a want. And there’s something so effortless, so freeing about that.

There are little golden flecks in his eyes. Mabel loves them. She loves him. And everything is so perfectly simple. She grins, and she pushes up and rolls him onto his back, careful of the bandage on his shoulder. Dipper’s eyes widen, but then he matches her grin. And she leans down and kisses him, and she lowers her hips, and it becomes her turn to make him cry out.

–

Up in the loft, there are narrow windows on three sides. Mabel keeps the blinds all the way up and only covers them with the curtains she made herself. Those are pushed to the sides now, and the light streaming in has changed its angle. Pale morning light had washed over them when Dipper laid her across the bed. Now, later, it’s nearing midday, and the light is warmer across the sheets and blankets, and across Dipper’s shoulders.

He’s lying on his side, spent and drowsy. Mabel curls up behind him, her knees tucked into his knees, and counts the freckles on his back. “There’s no big dipper,” she muses in a low voice, “but this could almost be Gemini.”

“The twins,” Dipper murmurs. His voice is muffled by the pillow and his own sleepiness.

“Mm.” Mabel kisses right between his shoulder blades, then wraps an arm over his side. “So. Judges?”

Dipper raises one hand, all five fingers splayed. Mabel almost scoffs before he pulls his hand into a fist, then opens it again, this time holding up three fingers.

“Only eight?”

“Points deducted for environmental factors.” He lays his hand over hers, twining his fingers between her own. “We’re both a little too beat up to achieve a perfect ten.”

“I’ll allow it.” She’s getting chilly, now that they’re cooling down. She pulls up one of the blankets over both of them and tips her head in, breathing in the scent of him, sweat and musk and an undercurrent of something fresh, from his soap or his deodorant. Then she leans back her head to look out the window, out at the trees, the sky, the lake. “I think,” she says, “we should stay here for a while. And when our bellies get all grumbly, I’ll make us sandwiches.”

Dipper rolls over, shifting under her arm, and leans in to kiss her forehead. “And this is why I love you,” he says, voice still low. Mabel grins. Then they lay down their heads, and she watches his eyelids flutter as he dozes off, lips parted, hair mussed. And if there’s any possible way she could feel any more wonderful or complete, she can’t figure out what that would be.

 

–

 

_**I love you, they said. I love you.** _

There’s something about this spot, these woods, this lake, that’s deeply healing. It’s been almost a week they’ve been camping here, and every day seems clearer than the one before, calmer, quieter in a good way. Or maybe it’s not the land. Maybe it’s just them, finally letting go of the bullshit, finally passing out of the storm and into the sun.

Storms will always roll in now and then. For Dipper more often, but for both of them nonetheless. It’s the way they’re wired, and the way their lives have left them. But it’s all right. Because they shelter each other, and in time, the clouds pass on.

It’s possible, Dipper thinks as he tries (and miserably fails) to skip stones across the lake, that Bill wasn’t so wrong about the nicknames he gave them. He doesn’t want to hear anyone calling him Pinetree, not anymore. It’s not the threat it used to be – time and actively trying to heal does make a difference – but it’s still a sour thing, a bitter name, and at the wrong time it can still drag him down. But it also wasn’t that far off the mark. Dipper plants his feet, digs down deep, stretches roots as far into the earth as he can. He stands stiff and defiant against the wind. It can be a strength, that resilience, that refusal to back down. It can also be a problem, that way of clinging so tightly to one spot, even if that spot is a total mental breakdown. It’s possible to root yourself too deeply to the wrong things.

And Mabel – shining, sparkling, high-flying Mabel. Of course she was Shooting Star. What else could she possibly be? Illuminating, inspiring, beautiful. But it’s the same thing. Just as that freedom, that light, make her so wonderful, they can be her downfall. Flying too high, too fast, too far off course, careening towards a crash and not knowing how to stop.

It’s why they’re so good for each other. When he’s too deep in the ground, she pulls him up somewhere brighter and more free. When she’s flying off course and reckless, he grounds her, gives her something stable to lock onto.

It’s not always intuitive. Mabel’s had an especially bad patch since they’ve been on the road, and it took Dipper way too long to realize. But when he did, it was automatic. Re-aligning to each other’s frequencies, finding that balance between earth and sky. Bringing both of them somewhere clearer, somewhere better.

Never in his life has he felt anything like this with anyone else. He can’t imagine that he ever would. After all, nobody else has been by his side from his first heartbeat. Only Mabel. And he wants her by his side at his last heartbeat, however soon or late that comes.

He goes back to the Warrior. The door is open, letting fresh air inside. Mabel is sitting at the table, her rubber cement and shoebox of papers out. She’s sifting through the papers – magazine cut-outs, scraps of wallpaper samples, calender pages, greeting cards – and picking out the pieces she wants, cutting things out, pasting together a collage. It’s very bright already, and there are four different tubes of glitter on the table, just waiting to be applied.

“Hey brobro,” she says, not looking up as she paints rubber cement onto the back of a daisy from a card. “There’s coffee on the stove if you want any more.”

“Thanks.” He reaches over and tickles the side of her neck. She’s not especially ticklish there, but she squeaks and laughs and wriggles away from his hand. Possibly mostly to humor him. He appreciates it.

He sits on the couch and drinks coffee and turns on some music. Mabel bobs her head to the beat as she keeps working on her project. Nothing in particular is happening, and it’s absolutely perfect.

It’s taken Dipper a while to understand that you don’t have to try so hard for every good thing in life. He spent so much time chasing things as a kid – monsters, mysteries, one-sided crushes, manliness, worthiness, approval. It used to feel like you had to earn everything. Earn your respect. Earn your strength. Earn your worth. Some of that is true, maybe. But not everything has to be a struggle. Not everything has to be won. Sometimes it’s just there, waiting for you to calm down and quiet down and notice it.

That’s what loving Mabel is like. When he just shuts up and stops trying so damn hard, she’s always still there. Waiting. Smiling. Warm and welcoming. Neither of them have to do anything. It’s just there, always, woven between them, stretching as far as it needs to stretch, never breaking. When it feels like it’s straining, it’s only because he is, or she is. When they stop struggling, the straining feeling stops, and then it’s as easy as breathing, as a heartbeat.

Even with the things that have changed in the past couple years, the lines they’ve crossed, the mark of convential relationships which they blazed past and barely looked back – even with all that, it’s still so simple.

He loves her. She loves him. They shared a womb, and now they share a life. And Dipper can’t imagine anything better than this.

From where he sits on the couch, he stretches out one leg and bumps her knee with his foot. “Hey.”

Mabel looks up, smiling at him. Her eyes are so warm, so bright, and there’s so much ease in her smile. “What’s up?”

“It looks good,” he says, and he means her project, but he keeps looking at her.

Her smile widens. She turns back to the table, picking up the glitter. “You flatterer. You’re just buttering me up so I’ll go swimming with you ‘cause you’re scared of giant snails nibbling on your toes.”

“Yep.” He feels himself smile, still watching her. “You see right through me.”

“Darn straight.”

She scatters glitter over a thick line of glue, and Dipper sips his coffee, and even when the smile fades from his face, he still feels it.

 

–

 

_**Submersion in cool water.** _

“Is the space heater on?”

“Yep.” Dipper jerks his thumb back towards the Warrior. “And I’ve got the blankets all ready for you.”

Mabel grins. “Is it stupid to swim outside in October?”

“A little. But hey, I did it too.”

She swings her arms, which are prickled with goosebumps. It’s about fifty-five degrees, but beautifully clear-skied and sunny. “I just really want to float one last time before we leave.”

Dipper gives her a little shove. “Go. Have fun. I’m gonna get stuff ready for tonight.”

“We still have whiskey?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” She pokes his nose with her finger, giving a high-pitched “boop!” to accompany it, then turns and skips down to the shore.

The water in the lake is cold, right on the verge of being too cold, but Mabel wades in. She’s grateful for both her hardy constitution and for the space heater she knows is waiting for her when she gets out. A wetsuit would probably be smarter, but she doesn’t have one, and besides, she knows her limits.

She swims a short distance into the water, letting the movement of her muscles keep her warm. There’s a spot near the shore, a little ways from their camp, where the trees hang over the lake. That’s where she ends up, and turns on her back, and finally floats.

It’s their last day in the woods. They have enough to make dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow, and then they’ll have to head back to civilization if they want to eat again. It’s okay. They’ve spent about a week here, and it’s been good. Her mind is softer and clearer than it has been in a while, and floating here now, it feels even clearer still.

Her chest and shoulders feel open, her mind expansive, her lungs big and clean with each deep breath she takes. Everything feels beautiful, and the world feels full of possibilities.

She floats and floats and floats, and it feels like all her problems are sinking down into the bottom of the lake. For the first time in ten years, she realizes, she’s not worried about Dipper. No quiet, fretful corner of her mind is wondering if he’s okay. She knows he is. And she knows he will be. And so will she. Even when bad stuff happens to them again – because it will, and knowing that and accepting that is part of what makes her know it’s all right – even then, they’ll make it through. They’re Pines. The things that have happened to them aren’t enough to keep them all the way down.

And besides, so many wonderful, beautiful things have happened to them, too. That’s what keeps them safe.

When her feet start to tingle, she swims back to the shore, climbs out of the water, wraps up in her big towel and squeals as she sprints back to the Warrior. Inside it’s warm and comfortable with the space heater on, and she dries off and warms her chilled skin by the heater, then dresses warmly and drinks a cup of hot tea.

Dipper isn’t in the RV. He must be off in the trees right now, setting up a cupful of whiskey for the razor-shins. They don’t know for sure if the razor-shins is real, but the loggers tell stories of it, and the twins know better than to chance it. Every night, they’ve left out the whiskey as an offering. Every morning it’s empty, and no creatures ever came to scalp them in the night, so it’s all even as far as they’re concerned.

Mabel sits with her tea and waits for him. The peace from her float on the lake is still with her.

When Dipper gets back, whistling and swinging the empty whiskey jug, Mabel already has firewood gathered outside the Warrior. They build a campfire together and let it get some good hot coals going. The sun starts drifting lower in the sky, and they bring out the last of their potatoes and eggs and cook them up over the fire. Bundled in their sweatshirts and boots, they eat and laugh and talk until the sun is gone. And when it’s dark and still, they huddle under a blanket together as close to the fire as they can get, and they drink mugs of hot cocoa, and they look up into the sky full of thousands and thousands of stars, huge and clear and expansive, and they find constellations together.

They sleep hard, spooned together in the loft, with starlight and moonlight coming in the windows and the sound of crickets everywhere. In the morning they have their last packets of oatmeal, and then Mabel says, “Well, unless we want to start hunting, I guess this is it.”

Dipper grins. “You’re better with the crossbow than me. It’s your call.”

She looks out at the trees, at the lake. She takes his hand and turns and smiles at him. “I think we’re ready to leave.”

They pack in and secure everything in the Warrior, then stand at the open door one last time. The air coming in from outside is crisp and chilly, and the sun is bright and clear. Dipper puts an arm around Mabel’s waist, and she wraps an arm around him too, and they stand there in their little side-hug and she silently thanks this place for being so beautiful and peaceful, for being the perfect setting they needed at just the right time.

Then they climb down into the cab. Mabel flips through her CD case. “What’ll it be?” Dipper asks her. “Synthpop? Neo soul?”

She smiles. “I’m thinking indie folk.” Dipper rolls his eyes, and she laughs, and she puts in the CD.

They drive down the narrow tree-lined roads. The sun is shifting through the tree leaves, flickering in through the window. Mabel sits with her feet up on the seat, knees tucked up, her travel mug of coffee wrapped in her hands. She looks at her chipped amaranth-pink nail polish, at the rip in the knee of her jeans, at the way Dipper’s thick hair is pushed back from his face, at the way the morning sun looks on all of it. And she smiles and hums along to the music.

It’s three hours to the nearest major road, then another half-hour to the interstate. So when Dipper asks, “Where to next?” Mabel just tells him, “We have time to decide. Let’s just enjoy the drive.”

He smiles at her. Then he reaches across the space between their seats and nudges her hip with his hand. She looks down, then looks up at him, returning the smile, as she reaches down and takes his hand in hers.

Dipper keeps his eyes on the road, but gives her hand a gentle squeeze. Mabel leans her head back against the headrest and looks outside. The sunlight flashes golden between the golden trees, and her coffee tastes so good, and Dipper’s hand in hers is so warm and strong and safe. And where-ever they end up next, whatever they end up facing, his hand will still be in hers, and that’s really all that matters.


End file.
